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Comment by jovial_cavalier | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, the pitch here is so over the top, so brazen, and so patently unbelievable, I don't think he should be charged with fraud.

I think the people he defrauded should be charged with incompetence.

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Although exact numbers are hard to determine[0], something like 90% of the global population believes in the supernatural. I don't see how a magical bomb detector is any less plausible than the other things they believe in.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism

You're very intelligent.

Have an upvote on me, good sir!

It does seem rather astonishing that they don't test these devices. It's not only fraud you need to rule out, but also genuine manufacturing errors, equipment wear and tear, etc.

The only explanation I could understand is that these were deliberate false positive machines (either for illegitimate profiling or parallel construction), but that doesn't seem to be how they functioned.

So as long as your fraud is funny enough or over the top enough you should get a free pass?

It's not that it's funny. It's that it's obviously false.

It's so false and wrong, I think that the people who bought it from him are more criminals than he is. You can't buy a tricorder from star trek for $60k.

I think the appropriate saying here is "You can't con an honest man"

You are quite literally blaming the victim.

No the victims are the dead people it didn’t protect - they aren’t blaming them. They’re blaming people who didn’t do due diligence when buying it.

Exactly, these people are in position of power, with mutiple degrees, staff and million dollar equipment. They are not just a rando off the street

Exactly. I'm being tongue-in-cheek when I say he shouldn't be charged with fraud.

But if people died because of this, he definitely should not be considered liable for their deaths. That lies strictly with the people who bought this without thinking about it for even two seconds.

People who spend money on a useless products are also victims. Of fraud. Yes, even particularly clueless people should be held blameless of the crimes of fraudsters.

To be fair, you have to be pretty damned stupid to actually believe this device would work. So it's hard to believe that the "victims" weren't in on this somehow.

the victims were the people who died from undetected bombs going off.

I doubt they had any knowledge of what devices were being used to sweep areas for bombs

It's incredibly unfortunate and disgusting that people died because this fake device was used in real settings, but that's obviously not the context being discussed here.

Blaming the victim isn't necessarily always wrong.

The definition of 'Victim' is thay they are not the one at fault

No it isn't. Someone who succumbs to lung cancer after smoking 1000 cigarettes a day for 20 years is still a victim of lung cancer. The definition of victim says nothing about causation.

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