Today I honor Mick at Metabunk.org for writing a great article about small companies that make big claims. I haven’t asked permission to repost here what Mick wrote there, but I do so in hopes you WILL make the time to read the other comments there!
There’s a type of scam out there that’s being going on for at least 100 years. A company claims to have invented or discovered something that will make a lot of money. Quite often this will be in the field of energy, although we see them more and more in the field of weather control and information technology. The company can demonstrate research, they will often hold one or more patents on the technology, and they will have some kind of prototype that does not actually fully work, but they claim is a demonstration of the proof of concept.
They won’t reveal all the details, despite having filed patents, because they either don’t want people to steal their ideas, or they claim it’s too early, and more research needs to be done.
What they are looking for though, is investors. They will talk about the huge potential market, and hence the huge amount of money to be made. They will get people to invest in their company. The technology will go nowhere slowly, and eventually the principals will withdraw, and the investors will end up with nothing.
The scam works because it’s not illegal to be wrong, unless you actually know you are wrong. So if you think you’ve discovered a form of free energy, it’s perfectly legal to set up a company to research and develop the technology. It’s quite legal to solicit investment based on what you think is correct science – even if it does turn out to be wrong, and the investors lose all their money. They took a risk, they lost. It’s quite legal to pay yourself and the other principals a large salary.
So all you have to do to run such a scam is to never admit you knew it was a scam. You have to pretend you believe in the technology. Then when it fails you simply keep insisting that you thought it worked, and you were sorry you didn’t get enough time to work out the kinks.
Then of course there are those people who actually ARE convinced that their technology works. There are plenty of people who think they actually have discovered something new, and they just need a bit more research to make money from it.
So which of the two is V3Solar?
V3Solar claims to have invented a technology that makes solar energy 20x as efficient. They do this by magnifying the suns rays with a lens, so you get 20x as much sun on 1x the area. Now regular solar cells don’t do this because the cell gets really hot, and breaks. V3Solar claim to have solved this by mounting the cells on a rotating cylinder, partly so that the wind from the rotation cools the cells down, but mostly so that only 1/20th of the surface is exposed to the concentrated sunlight at once.
The problem is they seem to forget that multiplying something by 20 and then dividing it by 20 does not equal 20. It equals 1. So they are right back where they started. Plus since half their solar cells are in shade, then it’s really 0.5, and since they are on a curved surface, it’s more like 0.3. Oh and not to mention that the solar panels are enclosed in a glass cone, so will actually get quite a bit hotter than regular solar panels.
Basically their claims make no sense at all. Look at the image of a “CoolSpin”:
End of Mick’s excellent post….
George Comments:
I think this is a lesson to pass along to your kids and grandkids. The very best thing you can do for our country is teach kids how to think with a pencil in hand, and teach them not to start in the middle. No higher math required most of the time.
As I’ve said before, the fact that V3Solar exists at all, is a testament of how far we’ve gone wrong.
What is it Fathers and Sons do together? And what do Science Teachers Teach?
The DIYer mind would likely make use of companies like V3Solar and Hydrovolts, and get their students involved in ‘THINKING’ about their claims.
Imagine the power of a guest post done by the 8th grade class at Madison Junior High shooting holes all the way through a theory that the Huffington ComPost Science Editor got so excited about that she claimed it brought her out of menopause!
But lets look at reality…. due to the lack of our involvement in the development of young minds, they are far more interested in fairies and fairy dust, the promise of the easy road, and they become prey.
Those grade school science teachers could change the course of mankind, but there’s days I think they teach more inline with their Master’s cause.
So Mick, I award you the Utterpower blue ribbon ‘Best Article of the Year’. Is critical thinking, a lost art for the common man?
It is truly dangerous to allow our children to believe in fairy dust, as it makes them all too easy prey,
GB
In my last post I told you of the Best of Better Gang Green Blue Ribbon Awards idea.
here is my unsolicited take on this subject, and yes i have been very vocal over the last dozen years or better.
these crooks (which i believe most of them are) and idiots (which i think some of them are) do unmeasurable damage to the industries they or their products relate to.
every time one of these characters goes out and gets funding, (and yes the crooks usually are the ones that hire the finest in marketing) and then as expected the company folds up, the funding source loses money, there is a lot of bad press, and the result is a guy that really has a bonofide product that actually has merit and promise, based on good science is damaged, in that he will never be able to attract funding/financing/grants or anything!
so who loses in the long run?
we all do! we lose to the crooks and the idiots
we lose to the layers of administration it took to distribute the funds
and we then lose again because the guy with the “real” product never is able to bring his offering to market.
so yes, we need to root out every one of these characters, track them down as they move from scam to scam and make it difficult if not impossible to get one red cent in funding for any of their schemes.
so there it is, as short and succinct as i could put it.
bob g
Bob,
I see a far larger danger…
Allowing this stuff to stand does a great dis-service to the entire planet, and as I’ve said before, it pushes all of mankind towards the easy road that always leads straight to failure and misery.. All it takes is for all too many to believe in the fairy dust they attempt to sell. And I do believe (as many others do) that we’ve reached a tipping point. So many I know not only believe in magic, they vote for it!
The amount of money stolen by these Green Widget Scams is right up there with Enron and Madoff.
There are THOUSANDS of such scams running.
Some of them look quite respectable on the surface (unlike the V3 spin cell which is just a joke)
Even a minor scam like the SunCube caused hundreds of millions in losses to retirement fund investors.
The lead complainant in the resulting class action – IBEW Local Union No. 58 Annuity Fund is now liable for further losses because the judge has dismissed the case “with prejudice”.
http://securities.stanford.edu/1041/EMKR_01/
Company directors were accused of telling massive porkies, inside trading and additional naughtiness.
Case dismissed….carry on business as usual!!!!
Gotta love Green Energy Scams plenty of green to be earned from green investors, green officials, green regulators, green politicians.
Excuse me……….I need to THROW UP!!!!
And was it just the other day, I was thinking about my Senator and my X Governor, I think their take is “anything green is good”, as long as they are investing the public’s money.
But Keef, here’s an example of the argument I’ve been attempting to make for some time. Look at IBEW LOCAL 58, they have come to believe in magic because so few care to take the scammers on. I think it’s the majority who believe it does no harm, and they are possibly more daft than the believers!
Tell me about it!
Apparently I am a lone voice, a sad deluded obsessive stalker.
I need to get a life.
Funny, I thought I had one 🙂
Seems you’re not alone, there’s 100 or more of us! You’re not that special!
Well, Keef, you can’t deny you have been stalking Watson on the internet for at least 6 years, and your arguments haven’t always been sound. For example, the case against Emcore (EMKR) that you cite was that they booked up orders to Green and Gold Energy which they knew were never going to be paid for, but it turned out to be unproven, so that doesn’t help your argument at all.
http://www.peakoil.org.au/smot.gif
Watson said “BTW the SMOT effect was verified as real by a French professor of physics. It is actually a very simple device to build and replicate the results yourself. Where the extra energy the ball gets in moving through the SMOT is not clear but I suspect it involves the unmatched charge of the shell 3d electrons of the aligned iron atoms.”
This is, of course, bullshit. As any professor of physics (or even a schoolboy) would know, the ball does travel up the slope, because the potential energy in the magnetic field is converted to kinetic energy, then to gravitational potential energy.
The ball then drops off the end. But what it won’t do is return to the place where it started of its own accord, at the bottom of the ramp. That is a place of high magnetic potential and currently it is in a place of low magnetic potential – close to the magnets. Moving it by hand to the bottom of the ramp seems “effortless”, but it is not. That is where the energy to keep the perpetual motion machine running comes from.
I have explained this to Watson and he refused to believe it. He even accused me of being Keef !
The Suncube did exist in small numbers, it did work, and it did get accreditation in Australia and India. Considering the complexity and windage, I don’t think it was ever going to sell in large numbers.
I note that the http://www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au website has been taken down. Perhaps Keef can rest now.
Dave,
I wonder how much dope you need smoke to come up with a name like greenandgolden? Or perhaps its a name they pick to prey on those who make no time to do their own thinking?
Concentrated PV is full of problems yet unsolved, and when the entire package is as well sealed as our proven sealed beam auto head lights, and just as durable and cheap, there may be a justified reason to invest.
Keef and I are at opposite ends of the stick, I see big government as the largest threat, I think he see greedy corporations holding that position. But some how we are both able to smell a steaming pile of bullshit from a long ways off.
It doesn’t help when Politicians use gang greenies as the useful idiots they are..
Useful work done can always be measured in BTUs, and the machine that produces the effort will always consume more of those BTUs.
History tells all.. but I think it’s especially interesting to see who hypes gang green bullshit. It’s normally some young freelance writer, 2/3 of the time a girl who writes about everything from toilet cleaners to bleeding edge CPV.. they don’t know a BTU from an IOU..
greenandgolden.com I equate that to bendoverandgrabyourankles.com
G
I’m a bit late in discovering your post Dave.
First the Emcore case
Before the case went to trial the lawyers for the plaintiffs inexplicably changed the complaint from “GGE was not a credible customer and could not have paid for the orders” to “Emcore did not have sufficient production capacity to supply the orders”
That argument was easily quashed and the case was thrown out.
A STUFF UP or worse.
The SunCube absolutely DID NOT get accreditation anywhere in the world.
The IEC certificate was exposed as a fake.
The one and only time an organisation actually got their hands on a SunCube and tested it the results were pathetic
http://nses2012.missionenergy.org/files/SUN%20CUBE%20%5BCompatibility%20Mode%5D.pdf
SUN CUBE FIELD TESTING
• We first wired 2 x 12V batteries in series for a 24V connection and
then connected it to sun cube….the multimeter gave us a current of
0.4 – 0.5 A…it did not go beyond 1 A….this was disappointing as we
were execting 10 A of current at 24V as this is a 300 W sun cube
which at 24V should mean 24 V x 12.5 A = 300 W….so we would be
satisfied if the multimeter showed us at least 10 A….
• Then we connected it to a 12V battery and we could get current upto
4 A….this was again disappointing as at 12V x 4 A = 48 W of
power….let me tell you the sun was very bright as we were sweating
heavily, the focus of sunlight was proper on the cells and the
multimeter was also fine…
Pune based Square Engineering said it
could not record 7A of current. Low current
as high heat but only diffused sun light.
• Greg Watson from Australia said, the units
have been tested and they deliver –
13.12 Amp DC STC
Golly! don’t tell me Greggy told a porky!
all we need do is look back in history and not that far back relatively speaking to the patent medicine scams.
some huckster puts some (hopefully inert) substance in a bottle with 90% alcohol and puts a name on it then sets out to peddle his elixir.
if he gets run out of town because the crap didn’t work, what did he do? did he go get a real job and become a productive citizen? hell no, he just changed the color of the liquid or the bottle, or the sticker and name and hit the next town down the line.
these characters (ok, i am being very charitable here) today are taking pages from the old playbook.
the numbers are bigger, the coverage larger, better advertizing, and willing idiots ready, willing and able to invest to get any return that is better than the pathetic cd rates at their banks, and we end up with a recipe for a disaster.
and it happens over and over again, and probably with an alarming number of the same players!
one of my favorite happened right here locally, some of the crew working at a pharma company discuss investments during breaktimes. one of them came in one day with the latest investment, and real deal, gotta act now, bottom floor, blah blah blah.
it was beautiful, it went like this
the internet is about full, there is no more expansion room left, as all of the domain names are taken or nearly so…
so we at “XYZ” hightech company are about to announce an initial public offering for the all knew “intranet”
this got really exciting for these guys, one was so impressed when he went to do research he was able to call the companies headquarters in chicago and talk to the company CEO! wow, he actually took an hour to answer all my questions so i took money out of my 401k and invested in the company a full week before the initial company offering!
he invested 50 grand with this crook! and several others sitting around the break table invested significant amounts of money too.
now what took place was clearly a scam, and likely just a hair breadth away from being criminal, as these investors never were able to recover one red cent.
what was the driving force behind taking such a risky investment?
a guarantee of 25% interest starting the first year, a verbal guarantee.
we need a clearinghouse or a data base to track these “characters” because they just reinvent themselves and keep popping back up with new schemes and bilk insane amounts of money out of the system, and folks hip pockets.
my personal belief is this, folks that perpetrate these schemes are criminals, whether it is a crooked investment scheme or pseudo science tech, or snakeoil, it is all the same crap. much like a B movie vampire they don’t go away and die, they just rise again and reinvent themselves and their product.
in the case of these characters, i am all for them being viewed as guilty until proven innocent!
i suppose these schemes have been around since the garden of eden and likely will be here till the end of time.
I have no problem except for two.
* Idiots vote
* Voters are stupid enough to allow Politicians ti invest the public purse in this scams.
They should have listened to me!
“the_oracle12 • Feb 5, 2010 8:53 PM Flag
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Keefwivanef Getting Very Desperate!
In his latest attempt to dissuade Emcore investors this dumb a$$ has come up with “SEC Can suspend share trading in Emcore.” Then he concocts some crazy scenario when and if…blah…blah…blah….
This guy needs to be committed to a hospital or mental institute under the Health and Welfare Code 5150 for up to 72 hours for mental observation. I think 72 hours might be too short. Perhaps, 72 years.
keefwivanef or whatever your other screen names are…. get a life, loser.”
Scammers hate people like you keef.. you need be more respectful..
I think the problem is…….nobody likes me to burst their bubble!
How far do the tentacles extend?
Well, just have a look at how far the Stinking SunCube reached.
From: Well Wisher
To: skmantri@fundmasters.in
Dear Mr Shinde,
Before you encourage investment in the SunCube related companies you should be aware that concerns have been raised about the product certification obtained by Square Engineering, as noted on many online forums.
Based on the amount of red flags for the SunCube, it will be quite difficult for it to get widespread acceptance. The real killer is their choice of testing lab (ITC India), which is not accredited as an ILAC member.
Given all the above facts, I believe that the SunCube has zero chance of acceptability amongst regulators, utilities and investors.
I hope you bring these concerns to the notice of the potential investor(s) in Square Engineering, so that they will be adequately informed.
Regards,
A Well-Wisher
From: Shiv Kumar Mantri
Subject: Re: Square Engineering
To: “Well-Wisher”
Dear Mr. “Well-Wisher”
Thanks for the update and will look into this.
However, investor would be more concerned about his Return On Investment. Square Engineering is promising a 20% return.
We and our group of investors are well aware of the technology and certain that the SunCube has a bright future in India.
Kind Regards,
Shiv Kumar Mantri
Fundmasters Management Consultants
Back! Back! Back into your cage…
Learn some reverence..
Let’s do a separate post.. 🙂
“in the case of these characters, i am all for them being viewed as guilty until proven innocent!”
That’s it in a nutshell.
I went to all of the authorities in my attempts to stop the SunCube scam.
Same answer everywhere, innocent until proven 100% to be guilty.
Inventor claims to have fairies at the bottom of his garden and I can’t PROVE he does not.
Scammer is free to launch the next big thing.
This is a loophole so large you could drive Greg Watson’s ego right through it!
Sorry….I was provoked 🙂
There’s really a simple fix! You simply hang Politicians who invest public money, and hold Pension Fund managers accountable when they invest in scams that wouldn’t pass muster in Mr. Swanson’s eight grade science class!