The story of the fake bomb detectors (2014)

"It does exactly what it's designed to - it makes money," McCormick is said to have responded to concerns about his useless ADE-651.

Wow. Did he legitimately say this? That seems likely to be a bad move if you plan on continuing to scam people successfully.

We still use this crap every day in Syria, by all branches of the army.

Supposedly it costs tens of thousands of dollars, and everyone swears by it. I just giggle whenever I walk past one.

Oh and it gets a TON of false positives, annoyingly.

It would be interesting if security forces were all aware of this and used it anyway... You'd have an effect on criminals who assumed it worked, plus it makes for great security theater.

Good account of a scam. Notable points for me were (1) exploiting the fact that the military are trained not to question authority (2) officials still refusing to admit they were conned.

And during all this time none of the buyers did verify the applied method and operation of the detector by taking it apart or at least by doing a positive check with known substances and materials that should've "made the thing beep"?

And a placebo effect, perhaps? Not for the person using it, but for those who were tested. I imagine that some would not carry explosives anymore, afraid of being detected. Some would change their behaviour and the soldier would also change, moving the magic-wand and "detecting" because both behaved inconciously different?

Until it's known not to work, it might have really helped in some cases.

I'm fascinated by its first use as a golf ball finder. I frequently have the idea that my subconscious has a much better idea where my ball went than my conscious mind does when my central vision loses the ball (or never had it).

You need to at least partially believe or suspend disbelief regarding such a mechanism for it work.

I similarly wonder if the micro facial ticks or subconscious "gives" from an attacker could be read by the user of the fake bomb detector. Essentially the device let's people make judgment calls using their "gut" feeling instead of being distracted by conscious false assurances.

Don't read this as justifying the fraud, just that the device may have a slightly greater than zero value. In a very different way than intended. If the choice was this security theater plus subconscious unlocker or nothing, maybe it was the right call. The problem with eliminating the fraud is that the slight value vanishes if no one believes in it.