Part Two: The Fake Bomb Detector Grift That Killed Hundreds

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And this week we are telling the story of a fake bomb detector that we're not getting a shitload of people killed, thanks to the idiomotor effect and how that's weirdly relevant to our current moments in American culture, AI, all this good stuff. Talk with me about that Ed Zittron, Ed, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. Now, Ed, you're the host of the Better Offline podcast and how are you feeling about the idiomotor effect and people being able to know what's real? I'm amazed by Clevver Hans. I think Clevver Hans is a hero who was unfairly eaten. My German soldier said he was murdered and they were very unfair to Clevver Hans. It was just desperation and not a punishment, but it does in the articles read a little bit like because they found that he wasn't really smart. They sent him off to die. He were a fraud, Hans. Oh, man. This is an I Heart podcast, Guaranteed Human. I'm Melissa Jeltsin, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it and the man they suspected wore a badge. And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an I Heart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to I Heart True Crime Plus subscribers. We don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for I Heart True Crime Plus and subscribe today. This is a constant worry and you can actually catch the model thinking I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user why. I'm Walter Isaacson, I'm my new podcast, The Builders. I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future. Welcome to The Builders, starting October 13th on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hamza and I'm Martin and we're the hosts of Out of Character. The funniest podcast in the entire world. I like that. It's a good way to promote ourselves. We are two funny guys having fun and enjoying ourselves and we just know how to have fun unlike anyone else. If you guys like fun conversations, hot takes, what else? Not too hot, just kind of loop warm takes to get your mind thinking a little bit. Listen out of character on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's all just a joke. What is the value of these women? I'm Bridget Armstrong, back with season two of the podcast, Curse of Miss America. We're talking to participants whistleblowers and people who say Miss America didn't live up to their promises. He looks and he goes, "You don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder." I never received a scholarship I need to pay for my student loans. Maybe this is the meta question for the podcast. What is Miss America at this point? Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, we ended last episode by introducing The Gofer, a gag gift that claimed to help you locate lost golf balls using the magic of the idiomotor effect into tricking people into thinking it was not an empty plastic box with an antenna. If you read the fine print at the end of those magazine ads that Sovi displayed last episode, you'll see that the manufacturer, Bragg that The Gofer was totally shock proof with solid state construction and no moving parts. Because again, it's empty. There's nothing in the box. Shock proof, something that was going to be a, is that a common problem with. You can still get one of those on eBay, by the way. I think if you drop it, it won't get disrupted because again, there's nothing to disrupt. It's not a product. It's not real. For 34.99, folks. That's a bargain at any price, Sovi. You can get one on either eBay or Poshmark, not sponsored. Thank you so much. You could have all the balls you need, listeners. If you've been feeling listeners, you don't have enough balls. The good ball finder people can help you have all the balls. Anyway, I'm going to start saying balls now. Please. One of the chief executives of the Quadro Corporation who gave us the Gofer and the evident designer of the Gofer itself, although this is a little unclear to me, but I think the designer was a man named Wade L. Quattelbaum, which I just, that's a good name. That's a good name. That's a good name. That's a good name. Yeah. Great names in here. Wade Quattelbaum was a former used car salesman from South Carolina. Yes. Who founded the Quadro Corporation alongside an American businessman, let's say Malcolm Stigrow. Yeah. The Malcolm Stigrow, Wade Quattelbaum, great names, left and right coming at you. It's awesome. So I have not found much about either man's early life, which is tragic, because you know it's two titans like this. They both had been doing cons their whole lives. I just, I don't know what Wade Quattelbaum was doing when he was 15 and I, that will haunt me the rest of my day. - Yeah. - And the shit beat it up for his second name. - Yeah, that's right. - Just the absolute crap. - Just the way it housed. - And every punch made him like, I'm gonna call him the fuck up at least, be. - Every business meeting with Malcolm Stigro, Malcolm just found himself punching Quattalbaum by the end of the, oh, I'm sorry, man, I'm sorry. It just, I don't know what came over me. It's okay, it happens to everybody. I found, again, not much about either, man, but when Quadro first started making and selling the Gofer, they initially put it out in a couple of small, Southern states, and it performs okay. It's like a reasonably successful gag gift for like Father's Day. You know, if you don't like your dad too much, and he golfs, maybe you get him a Gofer, 'cause they cost like 12 bucks, you know, at the time. They're not that expensive. - Probably 'cause the cogs are like two cents. - Yes, exactly. It costs like a dollar to make this fucking thing. - Yeah. - So this was not exactly the kind of business that was ever going to take the world by storm, right? You might be able to make some money off of thing like the Gofer, but you're not gonna get rich off of it. So Malcolm started looking at the world around him in this new post-cold war era, 'cause it's the early 90s, and one of the things he notices is he's thinking, where else could I apply what we've got in the Gofers? Is there any way to make more money off of this idea? He notices something, which is that, when he turns on the TV, when he watches the news, you know, he sees a bunch of special reports on the crack epidemic and the war on drugs, and all the dangerous things drug dealers are doing. How drugs are getting smuggled into the country? And when he's just watching like bullshit TV, every cartoon show, every like popular sitcom has like a very special anti-drug episode. And so he puts all this together Malcolm does, and he's like, I bet there's money if you could convince police departments in schools that you can help them find drugs, right? 'Cause like the canine units are expensive, you know, dogs can work, I don't think he doesn't realize what a con the dogs often are too, but they're expensive. And there's not that many, I got out of a dog search once, which was bogus, I had nothing on me. I just don't ever let the police search my cars, but they tried to bring a dog out. This is like three in the morning in Brady, Texas. And they couldn't wake the dogs up. That was the excuse I got for why I was free to go. I was like, we can't wake them up. We were gonna have them search your car, but they're too sleepy. So, again, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got that once. So, and that's to Malcolm, that's evidence, stuff like that is evidence of the market, right? There's not enough of these dogs. They're way too expensive. If you could convince, you don't have to make a real product, that you can use the idiomotor effect and convince cops and principles that the same thing that helps you find golf balls can help you find drugs, then you can sell these things and you can sell them for a shitload more, then you can sell like a gag father's day gift, but you don't have to spend any more to make them, right? Part of what's going into his calculations here is that in the early '90s, more and more schools are hiring school resource officers and they're bringing dare programs into their institutions and where there's cops in schools, you're going to have searches in schools and actually searching for drugs by hand is a pain in the ass, right? Especially if the school's big and canine units aren't cheap and they're off at an heavy demand, so maybe you can't bring them to a school if there's no reason to suspect drugs are there, but if you could put something in people's hands and they can just walk them around and search whatever kids they were gonna search anyway for drugs, then you've got a product, right? - Right. - Now, the problem is there's no actual scientific gizmo that can sniff out drugs. That doesn't exist today, really. People keep trying to make them, but we haven't figured it out quite right. They certainly don't exist in the early '90s and furthermore, neither Malcolm nor Wade have any idea how to make such a device. What they do know how to do is trick middle-aged men into thinking they've developed a golf ball finder and since most cops and school principals are middle-aged men who play golf, well, you can kind of see where they're thinking of it, right? - It's all ground. (laughing) - So, they change the name of the Gover to the Quadro Tracker and they make some cosmetic modifications to the outside, so it looks a little more high-tech and expensive. They're bigger, basically. He also has paper and plastic computer chips designed and installed inside the hollow plastic case. - These are home-powered? They're paper, they're just like paper and plastic computer chips. - And they're unpowered. The only purpose is to like convince idiots into thinking it's real if they open it for some reason, right? So Malcolm Stigrow and Quaddlebaum and their partners at Quadro market this new drug detector to schools and police departments at first in the South and Southwest districts in Texas, Kansas and Florida. So South East to say, yes, please. And they sign up to buy some of these things, right? So as soon as he's like, I've got a drug detector that you can carry it. You don't need to train it. You don't need to have a dog. And it'll tell you, you know, basically, they'll give you an excuse to serve exactly what you want to hear. Right. Yeah. It'll tell you what you want to hear. So police departments in school start buying. And I found an article in the Kansas City star from 1995. This is before these were, you know, proven to be complete bullshit that gives you an idea of how the media covered the Quadro tracker when it first starts being sold to schools in police departments. See if you can identify anything that seems incredibly fake from the text of this news article. Okay. Okay. I'm ready. Three Missouri schools will soon be using a new drug detection device that some critics are calling a modern day divining rod. The Quadro tracker is a small three and a half ounce black box with an antenna. It comes with a number of insertion cards that its developer say will detect marijuana, gunpowder and cocaine. Quadro corporation vice president Malcolm Rowe, who is an electrical engineer, said the Quadro tracker works by sensing the unique wavelengths produced by the molecules in controlled substances or gunpowder because it supposedly works through magnetism. It needs no batteries. The unit technology has not been patented because the company does not want to reveal how the drug detection cards work. Just quick question. Set the wavelengths. Yeah. Yeah. The came off the molecules. Yeah. The wavelengths are for molecules. Yeah. Just in controlled substances that this is straight up just this is how every AI company raises money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just like well, we have he's, he's an electrical engineer. He's an extra demis hasarbus. He's the head of deep mind and was like, here's a Nobel in chemistry. He wouldn't possibly just say about just shit he made up history. It's like what true detective will repeat the side because it's times a flat circle. It is. And it thinking about hearing that, I couldn't help but think like hearing this guy be like, yeah, that we haven't patented it, but like it works through, you know, that explanation, I couldn't help but think of the the open AI or not opening the the anthropic co-founder who spoke at that Vatican event and was like, well, we don't even understand the mysteries of how AI thinks. You know, it confuses and surprises even its designers because it really is as miraculous as the human mind, you know, like it's the same sort of BS who obviously there is a real product with AI, but yes, except they specifically made it do the things, the mystery. Yeah. Yeah. This is much more bullshit, right? Because there's not even like a product of any kind, really, yeah, but you do see how some of the marketing bullshit is the same. And yeah, I do find it very funny, like the idea that you're basing probable cause for searches on the device where the designer, so like we can't tell you how it works because then someone might know how it works. Then they'll start changing the molecules. Yeah. They'll change the molecules. The molecules on us. I'll switch it up. The molecules will be different, the drug dealers making the drugs will change the molecules to give off a different wavelength. I hate it when drug dealers do that, always moving the molecules around. What are we going to do? Then they'll do molecule science on us. Yep. Then we're fucked. We can't stop. We don't have drugs. And if they figure out the molecules, we're screwed. So three schools in Johnson County, Missouri are said to have bought trackers for $955 each. So they're selling these things originally for like eight to 12 bucks. Now you're getting $955 for the ones you're selling to fucking Missouri. Other sources show that trackers were sometimes sold for as much as $8,000, especially the law enforcement agencies. BJ Hodges, director of safety and security at Shawnee Mission School District, was quoted as saying, if it does what they say to do, then it's going to be a tremendous asset, not only to school districts, but to law enforcement. And yeah, if it did what it said it did, it would have been, but it doesn't. It's the Theranos thing, right? This is very much a Theranos thing where they're like, well, if you could really do a Theranos. Yeah. Off of a drop of blood, you know, but did they have both had to do any fake detections? Or did they just? Oh, yes. They've got fake detections. Yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They don't where the drugs are or whatever. You know, it's very easy to trick people with this shit. As we've talked about, we just went through all the different ways people were tricked in the past by this. It's the same ones in the future, you know, or the 90s. Quadro's marketing pitch included claims that their tracker could find narcotics behind the brick walls and it distances up to half a block away. It could even. What the. What? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It could even. This is my favorite part. If you want to think back to just what we were talking about a little earlier, they even were like, it can identify places where pot was smoked in the past, right? Which gives you, it's the same thing with the dogs where they're like, if it alerts and there's no drugs, they're like, oh, he had potpots. Well, that doesn't make any sense because of the, it's where the drugs work. Yeah. And it was the fumes coming off the drugs, that means the drug molecules are not giving off the wavelengths. Right, right, right. It doesn't make sense based on your bullshit science. Yeah. I mean, I was with you until the drug molecule wavelengths. That was right. Now I'll question it. Proof this is nonsense. Yeah. When it's also just like, you're saying that like, if this will alert anywhere people have smoked weed, isn't that everywhere? Right? Right, detecting several thousand streets in every city, if your device that you're using to search kids cars in the school parking lot can go off just because people smoked pot in the area in the past, then you can never use it in a school parking lot because you know what's happened in every school parking lot in the entire country? Kids have smoked weed, you know, like, um, common sense, I fear. Yeah. So I'm glad I found that old article because they do prove these old articles. You prove that at the time people didn't universally believe this crap. Both they give you the explanations of people saying why they are paying all this money for nonsense because they're idiots, but you get their explanations, which is interesting, but you also see evidence of the skeptics, right? And that's not when I first started reading articles about these and I was like, how are people buying these? The skeptics were never brought up. So it just seems like, oh, maybe everyone thought this was real and that's not the truth. When the Quadro trackers starts being sold in like 1995, famed skeptic and magician James Randy finds out about it and he issues a challenge to Quadro offering $507,000 to anyone who can pass a double blind test of the device. And first off, we love you, James. And second, after that comes a paragraph I did not expect to read. And this is about James Randy. He conducted a test with Missouri Seminole County School District Director of Security Wolf gang Halbig who was considering buying one of the units with a known sample of marijuana. Randy asked Halbig to find the card for marijuana from a number of unidentified cards in a series of tests Halbig did not get one correct. Now that just sounds like a debunking, right? Nothing sketchy about that and there isn't about the debunking. Do you know who Wolfgang Halbig is today, Ed? No. This has nothing to do with James Randy, it's just crazy that he shows up in this. Wolfgang Halbig was indeed the district director of security for Seminole County. Back then, in more modern days, because of his experience as a school director of security, he became a Sandy Hook shooting denier and a regular guest on Info Wars back when Alex Jones still ran it. He was a major part of the Sandy Hook denier. That's Wolfgang Halbig. That has nothing to do with the story. He's actually on a good side here because he is like with James Randy, he is busting the fact that this thing isn't nonsense, it's just funny that it's Wolfgang Halbig. It's very funny. It's also funny that he would have fallen for the tracker. He definitely would have thought this was real if James Randy hadn't saved his ass. I do love that too. It's so cool seeing how history is just full of dollars waiting to be conned. It really is. I love it. So police departments in Illinois and Georgia made purchases of the tracker despite this public debunking between 1993 and 1996. Quadroche sold roughly a thousand units around the United States. This paragraph from the article I've been quoting from should provide some explanation as to why. It comes right after they describe Randy and Halbig testing the tracker. Tests and demonstrations in three other school systems, however, convinced administrators to buy the units. They are still drawing up guidelines about how to deal with searches of students, lockers, cars, and belongings that the tracker hits. And we know now because of the lawsuits, these weren't real tests and demos and these other school systems. They were cons. But you see how the problem like this is a really perfect encapsulation of the issue that goes right back to what was happening with those scientists who got tricked by the table readings and whatever, right, which is you've got this actual test that proves the device is bullshit. But then the news coverage is like, but other school tests showed it works. Those aren't real tests. They don't detail the tests. They don't say what happened. They don't analyze those tests. They don't ask, are those tests real? Were they conducted by anyone but the Quadro Corporation? Were they double blind? They just report three other tests. Say it's real, right? And that's how shit like this winds up spreading everywhere. And keep spreading. They keep doing this today. This is the AI industry. Yep. Yep. Jesus fucking crazy. Even when you had all the ingredients to do decent journalism. Now, Rowan Quaddlebaum had other allies in their quest to push the tracker into every school and cop shop they could find Guy Lee Womack, an assistant US attorney, used his office illegally to market the Quadro tracker after he paid Quadro nearly 14. $15,000 for the distribution rights in Alabama, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming. So initially, it seems like this thing might be taken off, right? You've got corrupt members of the government who are like literally selling this thing and using their position to convince law enforcement agencies to buy it. Maybe this could work. It's never been a real product, but you might be able to keep it going for a while. As Jeffrey Stern wrote in a 2015 piece for Vanity Fair summarizing what came next. This quadracorporation grew, Roe attended security conferences, and one of them he met Sam and Joan Tree, a British couple with a modest and legitimate business selling evidence bags, fingerprint powder, and other supplies to police departments in England. Meanwhile, Roe's device had attracted the attention of the FBI, which tested one, determined it was worthless, and sent out a teletype warning to law enforcement agencies. Roe decamped to England and moved in with the trees. It didn't take long before a new version of Roe's device, with a new name, was being pitched to law enforcement agencies in England. So that all happens in '96. The FBI debunks the tracker and proves it's bullshit. He flees the country with the trees to start up a new grift. In that same year, a U.S. District Court in Texas hears the lawsuit USA versus the Quadro Corporation, which listed Raymond Fisk, Wade Quattalbaum, and Malcolm Rowe as representatives. Per an article in the 1996 issue of news briefs. According to the indictment, the company marketed the Quadro positive molecular locator as a detection device that used a chip to sense molecular emissions of anything from illicit drugs to explosives. Scientific analysis revealed that the device is simply a hollow box with a radio antenna attached, and the chip is a piece of paper between two pieces of plastic. Quadro has sold about 1,000 of the devices at prices for between $395 to $8,000 to school districts, law enforcement, and airports. Great. I know how this works. Well, you were completely correct that this is the Gova. It is the same thing. Yep. It's the same thing. The same thing. They were smart and they gave it a gun handle. Yes. You've got to have gun handle. You've got to have a gun handle. So look. That is real. Like, hall monitors can go around being like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Call me Paul Blatt. Got to have a holster for it. This is it, right? This was pre-blatt, though. Yeah. Flea, I wonder if any cops shot someone while reaching for the Quadro tracker? I mean. It's probably. It's probably got to be one, or at least a locker. So by this point, Quadro has expanded the number of cards they've offered and they added explosives to the mix, which really is an idea, like this piece of snake oil, the potential to kill a lot of people. Once they're like, it's a bomb detector, too, you know, you've escalated the human harm. Because if a drug detector fails in a high school, I'm not going to say obviously kids in high school with drugs sometimes it ends tragically, but nine times out of 10. If some kid is holding at school, nine times out of 10, it's like a joint or something, right? Right. And if they don't get charged for possession, nothing catastrophic is going to happen. But nine times out of 10, if a bomb detector fucks up, you've got a much worse like scenario here. So, statistically speaking, is it worse if it's a false positive or a false negative? Right. I guess that is true, that like, I guess both are bad actually, both are really bad because false positive with drugs means you're going to get fucked up and in trouble and possibly of your life ruined over not having drugs or having drugs, either equally bad to me, honestly, or with the bomb, false positive means people are going to think you have a bomb and maybe something really bad happens to you or it does not notice a bomb and then you get blown up. A false negative on drugs, not a big deal, a false negative on a bomb, big deal, right? Huge deal. Not great. Yeah. Potentially like world-changing deal, depending on what the bomb is. So the Quadro did play a bit role in at least one tragedy, thankfully not like what we were talking about. In 1996, the Texas Department of Public Safety called a search for the body of a seven-year-old murder victim, Karlin Smith. They used a Quadro tracker, presumably with a little boy corpse card to locate him. I don't know what card they put in there. It didn't find anything because it couldn't and that's evil because they're giving, you know, the family help. It's just gross to get involved with your snake oil in a search for a murdered seven-year-old, I think. I think that's evil. I'm like taking it really seriously and being like, yeah, we'll find your kid. Let me use this box with nothing in it and a bit of metal coming out of it. It's got a gun handle, those very serious. It's got a gun handle. Yeah. There's a lot of ghost busters, but your son isn't a ghost. We promise. Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe he is. You know, the Quadro will figure it out. Yes. You know who didn't lose their sons tragically, I hope. Maybe. No, we didn't, really. Here's the ads. I'm Melissa Jeltson and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights I should be dead. This is that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these grave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year. And I never know who that devil is because he's wearing disguise, sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Derio Amadei, Alex Carp, Feifei Leap, Almer Lucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they feel, and where they think this is all headed. Silicon Valley is always saying the cliché thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us. But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, who's imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity. Listen to The Builders on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Hamza, and I'm Martin, and we're the host of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around, but why should you listen hours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world, and we talk about pretty much everything under the sun. For example, music we're listening to, underground music, trending music, drama in music worlds. Yes, sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives like the cool Uber driver we just had, or the food we just say that is surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters, and so does yours, and this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen Out of Character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. And more than a century, Miss America sold the country a fantasy. But over the past decade, the crown's been slipping. They said, "Goodbye to swimsuits, now, hello to lawsuits." I'm Bridget Armstrong. Last season, we took you inside the world of America's next top model. Now I'm back with season two of this podcast, Curse of Miss America, investigating the rise, fall, and uncertain future of one of America's most iconic institutions. The Miss America Patent. I never received scholarship, I need to pay for my student loans. And he looks at me and goes, "You don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder." "It's great, but looks too ethnic." It's a story the Miss America organization really doesn't want us to tell. An exploitation of our Miss Americas is treated by the Miss America organization as an attack on Miss America itself. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So the good news is the tracker was exposed and forbidden from being sold in the United States under court order before anyone got provably killed due to this piece of shit. And even though the FBI and the subsequent court case both proved beyond any doubt that the tracker was worthless, some users still believed. This is a quote from that news brief article. "I haven't given up on the device," said John Belzer, the campus officer at Blue Valley Northwest High School in Beaumont, Texas, which pays paid about $950 for the device. I don't believe the skeptics, the scientists, or the FBI. It may not work on the exact principles that the company says it does, but it still has some merits added by Betzer. Mike Thomas, Safety Coordinator at Blue Valley, uses the device as a deterrent for students and remains convinced it effectively uncovers drugs and gunpowder. I did it myself, said Thomas. I found hidden shotgun shells. - Wow. - Great guys. - Hidden by whom? Hidden by whom? Well also, this is just you think that you're a good cop and that you couldn't be tricked. And so you wind up defending this bullshit device because you're defending your own ego. That's the brilliance of any time you can sell shit like this to serious people, you know? My job is to-- - Yeah, almost as if the more wrong you get, the more you double down. - Right. - Interesting, yeah. It's this thing of most people who are, quote unquote searching for drugs or bombs, to be honest. I don't really, don't have a real job that actually helps anyone, right? Not that, you know, especially finding bombs. That job is important, but most people who can say that's my job are just a cop who took like a class to get certified to get a little extra paid. They're not like an actual expert on drugs or on bombs or any of that. There's a lot of that fraudulent stuff in like police training that's a big part of while. So, not again, not that there aren't actual police explosives experts, but look at how the LAPD, for example, handled high explosives not too long ago. There's some fun stories of that in the recent past. And I think that's what's happening here. Is some cops who like, "Well, I did the training on drugs. I did the training on bombs. I have to know what a real thing is. If I think this device is real, it can't just me being dumb and getting tricked by this idiot motor effect. It has to work because I'm a professional, you know?" And it goes the whole way round to being like, "I know better than everyone else. I know better than the feds. I know better than these troublesome scientists with their fact-finding." That's right. That's right. Oh, these woke scientists. Fucking wokey scientists. And one of my favorite fun little side facts here is that one of the school districts who kept using this device even after it was banned. Was the McKinney independent school district in Texas where my mom used to teach. They kept using this thing. Again, after the FBI said don't use it. They keep using this because it's a deterrent, right? This is a one-up school official. We're not looking to nail a particular kid. We're looking to send a message. Likewise, a Louisiana principal said, "I heard that there had been some trouble with it, but I tell you what, I'm impressed with it. And this is not necessarily gonna be used to catch kids with drugs. If my having this thing keeps kids from bringing drugs on campus, it's worth it's weight and gold." Right? It'll just scare them off, you know? It doesn't need to be real. That's a really bad attitude to have towards your job presumably finding deadly substances on kids if that's the case. If something you actually take seriously, if you have this thing in your head about how the dangers of drugs know, would you not worry about not finding drugs? Yeah, I'm a brain. Concern that they can't find the things it's supposed to find, that they just discourage kids is really frustrating. So Guy Lee Wilmac was ultimately forced to confess that he'd used his office to sell snake oil. And he winds up having to quit the state attorney and I think he pays like a five grand fine. The men behind Quadro, including Row, were acquitted by a jury, though, and found not guilty on three counts of male fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit male fraud. And I think the main reason why is that their lawyers convinced the jury that they didn't think that they were committing a fraud, right? As long as they think it's real and because all these cops are going up on the stand and being like, well, I think it works, how could you know that the executives are lying? Well, these cops are saying they think it's real. Even if it's not real, these people probably believed it was and so it's not fraud, right? So if you wanna know who is to blame for what happened next because the fact that these guys don't get convicted gets a lot of people killed mostly in Iraq and the response is on the cops because the cops stop these people from getting arrested because they gave them a way out of this court case of the fraud finding, right? Jesus Christ. Now, I should note, though, I did find exactly one cop at the time who identified correctly what was going on with this thing. The commander of a Jefferson County Texas drug task force told the Providence Journal, we played with it in the office and got mixed results. Sometimes we'd find something sometimes not. Our rate of success was about half. I think it was either blind luck or a Ouija board effect. It's not nearly as consistent as drug sniffing dogs but there are no vet bills. So again, he's like, well, this is a Ouija board thing but hey, it's cheap. - Great. - It's cheap, and police work. - And it's not as good as dogs, which are also kind of a Ouija board thing. - Yeah, yeah. It's not just Ouija boards, all the Ouija boards. - Yeah, we're just Ouija boarding through our lives. - Yeah. - Please tell me it's not the same fucking people who do the bomb stuff, is it? - You'd hope, but it is actually it definitely is. So while all this is going on, Ro and the trees, that husband and wife couple who are selling stuff to cops in England, they're back in the UK repackaging the Quadro, which had been the gopher into a new form. Now, there's a little more opacity here as to like who made which new version of this device win. But from what I can tell, Ro and the trees produced a new version of the track that they called the Mole. M-O-L-E, all in caps, I think it stood for something and contracted a salesman named Gary Bolton to sell the Mole, right? Which they're building as a bomb detector. It'll find bodies, it'll find guns, it'll find drugs, whatever you need, right? Bolton was a long time friend of the trees, and together they all formed a new corporation called Global Technical to sell the Mole. At first, they're all friends. But because the Mole was meant for sale in the UK and Europe, Bolton decides like, well, if I want to really get this thing moving, I need to get a legitimate group of people who are attached to the defense industry to say it's real. And the best people is like the royal engineers have this like team of guys who like test stuff to see if it works, right? So if you can get the royal engineers to say this thing works, then you can sell it pretty much anywhere because the royal engineers are very much professionals, right? So 1999, he submits on one of the moles to the royal engineer's support team, and he asked them to repair a report on it. For the BBC, they found it was accurate, only about 30% of the time and could not be relied on. Now, that should have been the end of it, right? Well, the royal engineers found it doesn't work. But despite that, the same article notes that several years later, like four or five years later, when his house gets raided, Bolton's home gets raided, because of the crimes he's about to commit, police find two letters of support from the royal engineers and Mr. Bolton's offices. And he'd use these letters to pitch governments and law enforcement agencies around the world on the mole by saying, look, the royal engineers said it works, even though they didn't. And he definitely had the papers from them saying that it worked, even though they're supposed to have said that it didn't. One article I found on the corruption tracker claims that Bolton doctored the letters, but that's not necessarily true. Because Bolton remains involved with the royal engineers directly for some period of time after they test the mole and find it's bullshit. And in fact, after that test, they will help him actively sell the mole. So I don't know that he did doctor those certificates. The first thing you offer the mole, yeah, it's interesting. Well, we'll cover that more in a little bit. The first big hurrah for the mole and for global technical was a home demo that Bolton carried out. This impressed a businessman named Jim McCormick enough that McCormick offers to help them sell the thing in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Now, at this point, Bolton has started to get greedy and so has everyone else. Because especially, I think this guy McCormick comes in and says we could sell tens of millions of dollars of these. So all of the guys who've been working together start planning on how to go to business on their own, right? They don't want to share the profits with the others. As Geoffrey Stern wrote for Vanity Fair, quote, "The group would soon fall out amid rancorous charges and countercharges. All of them went on to sell versions of the tracker. But it was McCormick who had the greatest ambition. By 2004, he was going around England with a functioning prototype trying to find a company to manufacture a heavier model with a more premium feel, a series of awkward encounters ensued in which he tried to persuade factories to build something they knew wasn't going to work. But by 2006, he had found a manufacturer willing to sign on. McCormick was no longer a distributor. Now he was a producer too." So that's what happens with all of these guys. There's going to be so many different versions with different names of bomb detectors that are all the gover. There's four or five. They're literally the same tech. The all the same sold to 20 something countries around the world, thousands of them, all the same thing under different names, right? It's wild. Now we'll talk a bit about some of these other grift mold devices. But I want to say now, regardless of all the different things these names are sold under, again, this is just the gover. McCormick's variant, like most, used cards. You're supposed to load a card with the scent or essence of whatever thing you want to find. But that's not the only way grifters tried to pretend these things worked. Here's a quote from a different BBC article. Samuel Tree claimed that detectors could track down missing people if a photograph of them was placed inside. A technique he said he used to search for Madeleine McCann, who went missing as a toddler in 2007 and to other children. It's vile. It's vile. Yeah. Oh, just if you're an American listener, Maddie McCamp is a girl who went missing in Portugal, I believe. No one really knows what happens. There's tons of conjecture. Horrible. Of course, some dickhead with like a fucking goat, like just a metal stick in a box when, yeah, I'll find Maddie McCamp. Yeah. What's this? Alarmingly close to the power in Joe Joe's bizarre adventure. I don't like any of this at all. Use a photo to find missing, but it's firm and purpose unbelievable. So again, Madeline is still missing tragically. So his none of this worked, right? But the fact that Sam Tree made the news trying to find her is really bleak, right? And he's doing it because it was the biggest story in the UK for a while. This girl goes missing. The most British thing I've ever heard, some con artist. Yeah. And he uses the PR from this to sell the version that the trees make is called the Alpha six. And they sell it to the Egyptian government, to the Thai government and to Mexico for about $3,213 per gadget, although it varies depending on who they're selling it to. Their highest value sale was $24,000. And over a few years, they're only doing this for like four or five years. They make two million dollars at least selling these things. And per the BBC, they do it all while working from home. The Bedfordshire couple bought cheap plastic parts from China and assembled the devices in a shed in their back garden. These things cost like $2 to put together. They're just snapping together and then selling up to like the Thai government for $4,000 or whatever. It's nuts. You love it. Good stuff. It explains how every con happens. It's just if enough people believe something, everyone just goes, eh, fuck it. And if enough people who have the right job titles say this is real, you'll actually kind of find offensive that someone should test it. Right? Exactly. Yeah. So Bolton's device, after the mole, the one that he starts coming up with when everyone breaks off on their own is the GT 200. And this is going to be the most famous of these go for descended bullshit detectors. Bolton looks out by the fact that after everyone else split up to make their own, you know, drug detectors, 9/11 happens, right? That's like right after they all go into business for themselves. And Bolton has connections to the US government. And he has connections all over the world. He's very well connected guy. So he realizes as soon as this happens, everyone's going to be way more scared about terrorism now because of what just happened. And no one's going to be thinking because people are not thinking in the wake of 9/11, I can sell these fucking things like hotcakes. I can sell these everywhere. And people won't even double check to see if they work because they have a paranoia back then. Right. Yep. Yep. It's the it's taken money from a fucking baby. The BBC describes his sales methods. Sales demonstrations would be rigged to succeed. Anyone skeptical of the devices would be publicly humiliated. And users were instructed not to open the equipment to avoid damaging the sensitive technology inside. We can't look inside. It's sensitive. You might break it. You might break it. And how will we find the bomb molecule wavelength? Yeah. Yeah. It'll have the bomb molecule escape and want to look every bomb gives off a distinct wavelength from the molecules it's made of. That's how we find them. Yep. So some of the devices came with detector cards, as I've said, which were programmed. The fraudsters claimed to check everything from explosives to human beings and even dollar bills through concrete water and from great distances. Fraudster Gary Bolton even charged the royal engineers thousands of pounds for useless cards that went missing from a trade fair in which uniformed members of the royal engineer core were paid to help sell the GT 200. Right. If you want again, so the claim is that he falsified those things, but after they prove after they give this thing up, like say this is bullshit, the royal engineers take money to sell it for him. They're like at trade shows, shilling this and handing it legitimacy. Even though they know it doesn't work, I wonder why I wonder who got money, right? I've never seen that looked into enough, but it's very fucking sketchy that the royal engineers are involved with this product as long as they are. Now, I don't know precisely what happened here. I don't know if they just didn't know that the GT 200 was different from the mole, which is the device they tested. Home office scientist Tim Sheldon addressed this sort of in a 2014 BBC interview after the scandal around this all came out and said the involvement of UK government agencies and promoting this is very embarrassing and awkward. Yes, it is. And the royal engineers weren't the only ones. The British embassies in Mexico City and Manila were convinced to back the GT 200. And basically helped sell them to those governments by saying, Yep, it's real. So if it's going to show you, this is what this thing looks like, the GT 200, this fake bomb detector. It's got a pistol grip. It's got this antenna thing that swivels around on the top and it's got a holster. What are the stickers for? The stickers are so you can make your own detection cards. So you just put a, we'll talk about how that works in the second, actually, Ed. What great question, though. What are the stickers? There's sheets of stickers and like a jar that you're supposed to sticker it to put the stickers in and like a substance in order to charge them so that it can search for that substance, basically. And the brass card reader, of course, I assume brass is the best for molecules. Of course. Molecules love brass. Everybody knows that. Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. So not long after this point, the United States invaded Iraq. Bolton starts working with another international salesman, James McCormick, because McCormick has better connections to industrial manufacturers. Now in 2003 or 4 by that year, versions of these devices are in use in something like 20 countries worldwide by enough people that the makers had been forced to devise new methods for tricking their customers in order to make sure they didn't catch on users were instructed. They start telling people when they start selling these for thousands or tens of thousands to militaries, they're like, we can't just tell them just walk around with it. We have to explain how they can charge it because they're not going to, they're going to get sketchy if there's no power. So they tell them all you need is static electricity. So if you just, before you start your shift, each new guard, you grab it and you just sort of shuffle around with it to build up enough static charge to power it. And that makes it work. So you've got in all, in like Iraq and in Thailand, all these like soldiers who are just like shuffling around and they're stuck with this thing to charge it up before they go out on shift. So you shuffle around and then you go walk past like a line of cars. And if the intended dips, that means that, that car has explosives or whatever in it, right? It's a positive alert. Now, obviously, these give a lot of false positives. And when they give a false positive as they often did, the company representatives would either say, oh, there must have been a bomb there earlier or they blame user error or the weather, right? You know, you've got a lot of excuses. Oh, the weather was bad. Oh, it was that human. Well, that can't work in that exact humidity. You know, you guys didn't know that right? In 2006, McCormick inks a deal with a major manufacturing company to produce a much larger and more military feeling premium version of his device, the ADE 651. This was directly manufactured for the new market that had opened up and liberated Iraq, which now faced daily roadside bombings and suicide bombings and had a real need for an accurate bomb detector. Very few places have ever needed one more than Iraq does in 2006 question. Is there a reason it's called ADE 651 does that sound more real stand for anything? Why are they? What are they doing? Automatic detection equipment or something. I'm going to guess, but it's like it's it's sounds more military. I'm just wondering what an upgraded version looks like. Yeah. Yeah. What's upgraded about it? Does it have a second thing that lies to you? I think it's heavier. It's heavier. But they have a second thing that lies to you. No, just the one. How did they not sell like 50 SKUs of this thing? Just like they got this in pink for your female soldiers. I think that's how when they sell one for like 30 grand, they probably just make a bigger one and say like, oh, this will detect plutonium. Hell yeah. But it's a little unclear. I did find how they like the instruction manual claimed it worked. So this is the BBC kind of summarizing the instructions you got with this thing if you're some fucking soldier in the Iraqi army. Number one, a small amount of the substance the user wished to detect such as explosives was put in a clip top jar along with a sticker that was intended to absorb the vapors of the substance. The sticker was then placed on a credit card sized card, which was read by a card reader and inserted into the device. The user within a hold the device, which had no working electronics and the swiveling antenna was meant to indicate the position of the sought substance. So again, these things cost about two pounds sterling to make, but they could be sold for 5,000 pounds or so on up to like 20 something thousand and one even sells one of these sells for half a million dollars. That has to he has to put it in like a big ass box, right? And so you put the sticker by a bit of bomb residue. Right. And the vapors in the jar, of course, because how else would the vapors be kept? And the sticker soaks it up. How would the vapors be stopped from escaping before you put them in the jar? I don't know how the vapors are supposed to work. And I'm not really sure how the vapors are you're supposed to be functioning here. - Don't think they know. - I don't think they know. - They know. You think that anyone could scam most governments? I think I could. I think I could sell. Oh, 100%. Yeah, absolutely. Without. We need to go, we need to go back to just, I think I could just sell the US Army water and claim that like, I prayed to it and it'll stop bullets. You don't need vests anymore. Just drink the special water, you know? I only got to sell a few of them at the prices. The army's going to pay. There are hydration mechanisms for advanced war fighters and it's just water. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Warwater. Warwater. Water. I'm Melissa Jeltsin and in my new podcast, what happened to her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights I should be done. Cases that everyone else called closed. These stories all start in the same place. The woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. And we were babies. I never know who that devil is because he's wearing disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast The Builders. Elon Musk, Derio Ammanade, Alex Carp, Fei-Fei Lee, Palmer Lucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they feel, and where they think this is all headed. But when you say us, who's us, is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Listen to The Builders, on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast, or ever get your podcasts. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them to listen to these days. How are you going to get to us? Well, there's a specific reason why you should listen to us. We are the best podcast in the entire world. I swear. I know. Bold. But why don't we list some of the things we might talk about on a regular episode? So sometimes we'll talk about, I don't know, the Uber driver we just had. And how nice they were, or if we tip them or not, come and find out. Sometimes we'll talk about that weird news story from last week. It's the one you're thinking about. Trust me. Or maybe we'll talk about music and what's happening in the underground, or drama and music, or TV shows, or the Med Gala and what the actors wore. What we're saying is we're not afraid to talk about everything under the sun. And if you want to see what that's like, come join us. It's a place where everyone can hang out, anyone, wherever you're from, whatever you're like. You're welcome. Listen Out of Character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. But more than a century, Miss America sold the country of fantasy. While you're ready, ladies, here we go. They said, goodbye to swimsuits, now, hello to lawsuits. I'm Bridget Armstrong. The Miss America pageant. He looks and he goes, you don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder. It's great, but looks too ethnic. It's a story the Miss America organization really doesn't want us to tell. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. So the fact that these things now look as expensive as military grade gear made them sell like it. That's why they're getting more money. And the new Iraqi government goes gaga for these devices. One of the gross things initially in like early reporting is like the news will write about this as if, oh, they just are too dumb. They didn't know that it was fake because like they got tricked. They're not tricked. The Iraqi government doesn't buy these because the Iraqi government is tricked. The Iraqi government buys a bunch of these because they're bribed. All of the people buying anything for the Iraqi military are corrupt because every single Iraqi government official in this period is hideously and horribly corrupt. And that's basically still true today. These are not being bought because they really think they're real. McCormick and Bolton are saying like, hey, it's your job to buy these for the Iraqi army. Here's several million dollars. And then they'll buy a bunch. Right? That's what's happening. They're not idiots. They're corrupt. Right? Iraq becomes the number one buyer worldwide for fake bomb detectors in the space of a few years, spending more than 53 million pounds on no less than 5,000 of these devices, making the worldwide sales value of the 80 E651 in similar models, at least tens of millions of dollars over just three to four years, potentially as much as 100 million dollars. We know that McCormick falls in love with selling to Iraq, who would buy versions of the 80 E651 for as much as $40,000 per vanity fair. McCormick was also giving volume discounts and paying kickbacks according to investigators who have also suggested that he was diverting money into offshore accounts, but whatever the size number, McCormick was flying high, even by the lofty standards of defense contracting. When combined with sales and a dozen others, McCormick's income over five years approached 80 million dollars. So he does very well off of this. We haven't even got to all the people that died, I assume. No, no. We're getting there. Very good. We're getting there. And like any guy who buys, you know, gets suddenly rich, he's gonna have splurge on some rich guy purchases. He buys a $5 billion house and bath with an indoor pool in the fancy sound system. Literally anywhere else. Well, but he bought this one from Nicholas Cage. This was Nicholas Cage's former house. You could only buy one of those. Well, I guess you probably could buy more. But he does buy Nicholas Cage's old house and bath. He gets a vacation home and cipher us. He buys a yacht, but he rarely uses either. Instead, his main hobby is pitching and selling this thing to new marks. Now, when you're using a bomb detector to find bombs and the bomb detector doesn't work, it's not going to take long before people start dying. Sure. We don't know exactly how many people get killed by this because among other things, in the early days, whenever an 80 e651 is clearly responsible for like a failure in a bomb getting through, again, the government is full of corrupt people getting kickbacks. So they just pretend that didn't happen, right? Right. It's very easy. It is also, this is the Iraqi army. It's super easy for the company to be like, well, they're just not very good at using it. It's user. Right. They fucked up because they are. The Iraqi army was not very well trained. Still, during one massive wave of bombings that his detectors failed to detect in 2008, he scheduled McCormick scheduled a press conference from Baghdad in which he stood with the head of Iraq's bomb squad and pitched his detector seemingly without shame. What makes this all infuriating is that the GP200 and the other precursor devices had by this point been repeatedly tested and demonstrated as fraudulent in the UK and the United States, where they were manufactured. Per corruption tracker, quote, "Despite the fact that the devices were tested again in 2001, this time by UK Home Office scientists and again found to be fake, the companies continue to operate and sell them and receive promotional support from various branches of the UK government, including the Embassy in Mexico, UK trade and industry who provided support for displaying the equipment at trade fairs and members of the military who exhibited the devices. Predecessor devices had been tested and found useless by the United States as San Dia National Laboratories in 2002, and by the US Navy-explosal-ordinanced-sposal-technology division in 2005. So US and British soldiers in Iraq are not using these things. And part of what eventually causes a problem for these guys is that the smart US and British soldiers in Iraq realize they're bullshit and realize like, wait a second, our lives are on the line by guys using these to look for bombs. Whoa! Somebody's got to do something about this. Let's start pushing into 2009 to remove these things from fucking checkpoints. The BBC's news night focused a special report on the matter and regulators in law enforcement in England started gathering evidence and carrying out the early stages of an investigation. I'm still being used this time. Everyone's still using them. Maybe actually at that year, they raided James McCormack's home and took a bunch of evidence. So you'd think, well, they're probably not still selling them at that point. Yeah, because he'd think. So at this point, a detective constable in London, Joanne law does attempt to stop these things from being sold anymore because they're fake. And she runs into England's export control law, which only gives the government the ability to ban military hardware and security equipment, that's electronic. And since there's no electronics in these things, they can't initially be banned. The fact that they're fake protects them. Like, that's the original. They can't immediately be banned because they're not electronics. They don't fall into it. That's unbelievable hell. Yeah, this rocks. It's so funny. This part's not funny. All this comes to a hideous climax in the fall of 2009 when a 20 and this is in like October, a 26 seat bus filled with a full ton of explosives rams into the Iraqi Ministry of Justice and Baghdad. Now, what happens here is a few things coming together. You've got in 2009, the surge has just happened. The awakening has happened. This is actually a relatively peaceful period of time in Iraq, right? And so there's a drop in the number of bombings. And that convinces Prime Minister and future subject of this podcast. We'll get him. Noray Al-Maliki to take down security measures and Baghdad, including blast walls because things have gotten safer and that would look good for his administration. So there's not walls up, which is part of why this is so bad. But the bombs get directly to this fucking justice building and go off and 155 people are killed at least. I mean, it is a massive, hideous bombing hundreds more injured. It is hard to exaggerate how like the one of the worst single bombings in Iraq's history, like they get carried out here. And a subsequent investigation finds that per the New York Times, the bomb truck quote had to pass at least one checkpoint where the 80 East 651 is typically deployed. So we know it goes through at least one checkpoint that should have had one of these things, which meant it didn't get caught. That article quotes a US general saying obviously these things don't work. We would use them if they worked. However, quote, the Iraqis believe passionately in them. Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs said major general jihad al-Jabiri head of the ministry of the interior's general director for combating explosives. I don't care about San Diego or the Department of Justice or any of them general jabiri said, I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world. Amazing, amazing comments. If you have met as many Iraqi general army generals as I have, you know a couple of things for one. They're all corrupt liars. And general al-Jabiri was no exception to that rule shortly after that interview, the Iraqi ministry of the interior arrested major general al-Jabiri on corruption charges arguing that he'd taken bribes from McCormick. Now, really charges were dropped because it's a rack, but you shouldn't take that to seriously. The Iraqi government was then and is now ludicrously corrupt. Harif al-Karawi wrote about this in 2013 for an article in al-monitor, quote, an al-monitor, quote, security related ministries have seen the worst examples of corruption because of their huge budget allocations, poorly monitored US financial support and the urgent need to build them from scratch. There were reports by the integrity committee, the US general inspector in Iraq and the parliamentary security and defense committee on the hundreds of millions wasted because of corruption in these ministries. Yet, except for a few mid or low level officials who found no political sponsor, all partisan senior officials managed to escape punishment or accountability. Wild! How? I just don't seem. I guess the justice system works out for that. It's a great justice system, the Iraqi one. It's so good. Really good. Really good. You should ask the founder of ISIS, what he thinks about the Iraqi, although that was really the US justice system in Iraq. Anyway. McCormick, the trees and everyone else, the British government could get their hands on were arrested in 2010. The court cases that followed found that corruption in the military was often a reason why these things were sold. A report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction in 2011 estimated that 75% of McCormick's revenue was recycled to bribe military officials in multiple countries. Right. Which is how he's selling all of these. That is called the sales marketing expense. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. We had to bribe them to get them to buy our product. Yeah. How much are you going to do it? Exactly. In the corruption tracker ads, in Thailand, the device is not only allowed through real explosives, but in the south of the country where there is an ongoing conflict with a separatist rebel group, security forces have used the devices to justify the false imprisonment of hundreds of people according to rights groups. So it's not just people that they kill through letting bombs through. They also let governments murder, torture, and imprison people by pretending they had explosives. These people. We don't have a lot of them. A lot of people. We don't know how many probably house. Again, in Thailand, people are getting through bombs detecting checkpoints with bombs. I have no idea how many people in total die. Iraq continues using these things of checkpoints for years afterwards. I'm not convinced there aren't any in use still. Right. Now, the good news is that a lot of the bad guys in this story were sentenced for their crimes. McCormick received the maximum sentence for fraud 10 years, and he was actually sentenced to two more after his release because he kept breaking the law. His assets were clawed back as much as possible by the state, but his vanity fair noted this is not did not spell an end to the grift. A year after McCormick's conviction, the Egyptian military began testing an apparent adaptation of McCormick's device called the C-Fast, claiming it can detect both AIDS and Encephalitis. Last June, 38 people were killed at Jina International Airport in Karachi when attackers with suicide bombs and rocket launchers got past the airport security force, which has admitted to relying on the 80-651. Another version of the device was reportedly being used in Thailand. Mexican police looking for drugs have incorporated the device into their stop and search procedures. If they ever acknowledge that the device is a fraud, the convictions resulting from those searches would be vulnerable to litigation. In some countries, sheer corruption keeps the device in the hands of soldiers and policemen, maybe even up to the present day. And that's a beautiful story of a scam device that how you feeling? I hate every person involved in this. I hate them so much. It's also, if you're right, it hasn't inspired me. It has totally inspired me because it's like the same. It's people with AI especially. They are like, well, so many smart people couldn't be wrong. Actually, they could. They could be wrong. They should have died. It happens quite often, thank you. Yeah, yeah, Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, it's, it's just, yeah, loopholeism, right? Whenever you think, well, this guy is really smart. He couldn't get tricked. Smart people get tricked all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, Ed, you want to plug anything before we roll out? Where's your ad.ad for my newsletter, better offline podcast. You can find it on YouTube and where you find your podcast. I'm at Zitron. Please interact with my content. I need you to. Excellent. Interact with Ed's content. Interact with my content and interact with yourself by getting to know yourself and loving yourself the way I probably don't love you because I've never met most of you because that would be really hard for me to do. But you know, in theory, I support you loving yourself unless you're a bad person, but I don't know that. Bye. Behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media. For more from cool zone media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing disguise. 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