Too Good To Be True!!!!!

I have just read the BBC report on an incredible fraud. One that just goes to show that some things are just too good to be true and, must, I believe, support the supposition that you cannot con and honest man.

Without cutting and pasting the story, a business man sold what was protrayed as a leading bomb detecting technology and made £50m in the process. Despite containing no electronics these detectors were supposed to be able to detect almost anything, anywhere and under any concealment. Too good to be true, one would suspect so.

Selling at around £27,000 these were based on novelty golf ball detectors bought in the US for circa £8. Iraq bought around half of these (ie over 6,000) devices, but just look at the device:-

Who in their right mind would pay around US$40k for each item? And having been bought who would believe they could work. Professional soldiers and police have been using these in regular security operations. Surely at least one must have suspected? That these were bought over a number of years and used (apparently) seriously defies belief.

I suspect the relevant security forces would have had more success using a pair of birch twigs as divining rods. The devices are described as novelties so I suspect they cannot find a golf ball either, but that is not stated.

I find myself just shaking my head. They do say if something seems too good to be true then it probably is and this must fall into that category and for a fraid of this scale and stupidity to have been sustained for so long suggests that there were many people who looked no further than the money that slipped into some discrete bank account. This all at a time when others went about their lives in the blissful ignorance that the protection they were being offered was worthless.