How To Spot A Psychopath

In a development so astonishing that this month’s issue of Astonishing Developments Magazine has been held back for a complete rework to accommodate it, “Colourful Perth businessman Warren Anderson has fallen out with his friend Tim Johnston - the founder of failed fuel technology company Firepower - after chasing him to Bali.”

Apparently Tim wouldn’t meet with Warren. Poor Warren. Everybody, all together: “Awwwwww.”

All Warren now has to comfort himself with is the millions of dollars he made by offloading his Firepower shares before they, inevitably, fell to zero. And, um, also all of his numerous other millions.

But he does get points for using the word “henchman” to describe another of Johnston’s business associates.

“You will see: we will eventually be vindicated and our investors will be well rewarded”, claims Firepower boss Tim Johnston in an interview with The Australian. He also insists that he hasn’t been hiding at all. (He just hasn’t been anywhere the people who want him to pay what he owes have been looking. Oh, and not answering the phone, either.)

Johnston insists he’s perfectly innocent, all of those never-shown-to-do-anything Firepower “products” work fine, Four Corners’ report was a vile calumny, the investors will all get their money back, et cetera.

He also, at one point, is reported to have used the word “fricking”.

And now, another link-dump of news stories about Firepower that’ve come out since my last update, in roughly chronological order, newest first:

Apparently Rose and Willie Porteous, or maybe only Rose, also bought into Firepower, and are as a result now one step closer to the penury which anybody which who cares to read up on them will, I think, agree they deserve.

The Australian High Commissioner in Pakistan is reported to have “acted unwisely” when she bought 200,000 shares in Firepower, but has been judged to have suffered enough, and so kept her job.

And there was a brief flap over a gaggle of Australian Defence Force chiefs who, apparently, invested in Firepower, and then became rather kindly disposed to the company. To the point where they let Firepower use the Navy frigate HMAS Sydney for a function in 2006, for free.

The function was to launch the basketball season for the Firepower-sponsored Sydney Kings, who followed Firepower down the plughole and no longer exist.

(The above Herald report is excellent, except for the part where it says “Firepower employees at the function literally swept from one person to the next generating confidence”. One would think they used brooms for this purpose, but they were on a ship, so perhaps they swabbed the deck with mops.)

Firepower, by the way, gave people attending the above Frigate Function goodie bags including some of their magic pills, the unimpressiveness of which started the ball rolling at the Herald.

The previously-mentioned Warren Anderson said that people who’d lost money on Firepower were just “greedy“. This statement was received with a certain amount of astonishment by the company’s liquidator, who pointed out that expecting an investment to appreciate is kind of… the only reason why anybody invests.

Anderson’s point was that many Firepower investors had “accountants and bloody lawyers and Christ knows what”, and so should have been able to tell that the company wasn’t on the level. And, one presumes, should then have sold on their foolishly-purchased shares for a handsome profit before Firepower folded. You know - like Warren Anderson himself did.

The above-linked article isn’t primarily about the liquidator; it’s about some un-named “Sydney man” who’s alleged by a large group of small shareholders (presumably not including the ones who had “accountants and lawyers”…) to have embezzled five million bucks from Firepower. And therefore impeded Firepower’s efforts to keep all of that money for itself.

The creditors are chasing this guy because, according to local litigation-funding company IMF, they’ve got bugger-all chance of squeezing any cash out of Firepower’s entirely straightforward and above-board international operations. The liquidator previously said that unless the investors find someone to sue, they’re not going to get a penny.

And then there’s one Frank Timis, described in The Australian as “a colourful Romanian-Australian businessman”, who says he’s starting a new business that’ll repay (plus ten per cent!) all of the ripped-off investors.

Timis and his new company, the entirely-unconfusingly-named “Greenpower” (or perhaps “Green Power“), scores a mention in the recent Johnston interview piece, too. Apparently Tim and Frank will be issuing free shares in the new company to shareholders in the old, so don’t you worry about that.

(About 25 seconds after Timis said investors would be paid back, the IMF litigation-funders pointed out that this promise might just possibly not be worth an awful lot. IMF, like others, advises investors to consider their money to be gone, gone, gone.)

My “what?!” for today was prompted by a Perth Now piece titled, wait for it, “Johnston builds new Firepower“.

Yep - Tim Johnston, creator of the whole Firepower debacle, is “…trying to buy Firepower stock and assets for overseas-registered company Green Power Corporation”.

(The piece goes on to point out that the Green Power Corporation in question is not this one in Thailand. So don’t hassle them unless their Web site suddenly starts sprouting ads for magic fuel pills and/or expensive franchised engine-cleaning machines.)

[UPDATE:: “Firepower chief back to try again“. Such grit! Such determination! In the face of such skepticism! The actual newspaper reports are now frankly calling Firepower’s products “fake”, but that does not deter Mr Johnston!]

While we’re all waiting for a more pleasing headline - I suggest “Johnston gets twenty years stamping numberplates for conventionally-powered cars” - here’s a selection of other recent coverage of the Firepower saga.

“Anderson in shares scandal” is another Perth Now piece, about the “colourful” Western Australian property developer who apparently bought a bunch of Firepower’s not-quite-legally-issued shares and sold them on for a profit of more than four million bucks. (Here’s a longer piece from The Australian on this subject. I presume Anderson is still eager to opine that Tim Johnston is not a criminal.)

How much of that four million, and all the other millions poured into getting a share of Firepower’s worthless products, can the naïve investors expect to get back, I hear you ask?

That’s right: Not a cent. Small investors are, as usual, screwed the hardest.

Firepower’s largest single creditor (of a cast of thousands) continues to be Tim’s former business partner Ross Graham, who I mentioned in this post.

The Firepower site still says Ross was very pleased to be involved with Firepower, on account of its amazingly valuable products and rock-solid business fundamentals - but what he’s actually doing now is spending another hundred thousand bucks to get a liquidator of his choice appointed to the now-very-dead company, so as to maximise the chance that he’ll get back at least a little of the ten million bucks he says he’s owed.

I continue to wish Ross no luck at all in this venture. If you take an active role in a scam and then find that you’re one of the people that ends up ripped off, you deserve what you got.

(Previously, there were hopes that Firepower could somehow be “rescued“. Those hopes were of course dashed. The idea that Firepower was even worth rescuing was based on the incorrect assumption that the Firepower products were good for something, and not just the latest version of an old, old scam. That same scam had been run by the same guy on previous occasions, for Pete’s sake.)

Slightly earlier: Firepower financial info ‘goes missing’. Apparently Firepower kept some rather important salary information on one computer, with no backups. That computer apparently, like the Luggage, followed Tim Johnston to his current undisclosed, but probably lavishly furnished, location.

Said undisclosed location apparently has rather unreliable telephone service. Tim hasn’t even been able to talk to creditors on the phone.

My occasional correspondent Gerard Ryle, still working on his book about the Firepower story, wrote “Firepower collapse fallout” for the Sydney Morning Herald. Apparently the sportspeople and teams who got stiffed for sponsorship money Firepower owed them, and the other sporting schmucks who invested in Firepower and lost the lot, were the lucky ones.

The unlucky ones are the ones who actually got money from Firepower - after it was already insolvent. They have of course generally spent that money, but may now have to repay it, because the creditors want it.

There’s a point worth making: It’s not even safe to accept payment from a rip-off artist. If the money he pays you turns out to not have been his to give, you can end up in a much worse situation than if he hadn’t paid you at all.

Earlier, Tim Johnston was “reported to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission for further investigation”. I expect ASIC to take three, or maybe seven, years to generate a very thorough report indeed on the several most reliable ways in which stable doors might, in future, be bolted.

To be fair, ASIC apparently started investigating Firepower late last year, after previously ignoring warnings. And shady companies like Firepower can pretty much always slither past government regulators for a while, partly because they simply don’t file any of the legally-required paperwork, and so don’t appear on the regulators’ radar until plenty of suckers have already paid up. But it wasn’t until July this year that they took real concrete action. Casual basketball fans figured the situation out earlier than that.

So it really does seem that ASIC were very slow to react to the quite obvious shonkiness of this very high-profile company. I suppose the fact that Firepower had leverage with Austrade didn’t hurt.

Rob at Boing Boing Gadgets has been favoured with correspondence from an enthusiastic proponent of Fuel Freedom International’s “MPG-Caps”. They’re yet another magic pill for your fuel that’ll give you more power and better mileage and whiter teeth and so on.

I think it is safe to say that Rob was not 100% sold on the idea.

The MPG-Caps also have their very own page on fuelsaving.info. Apparently they’ve been on sale for an awfully long time, under one name or another - but what do you know, even after decades there hasn’t been one proper independent test that proves their claims.

So away we go again. A fool and his money are welcome here.

The whole Firepower episode, like numerous other collapsing scams that I didn’t personally have anything to do with, reminds me of the bit in the last episode of Band of Brothers where Webster abuses the endless line of German captives marching past him under guard: “What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives… For what, you ignorant, servile scum?! What the fuck are we doing here?”

Over and over, these God-damned scam artists take for suckers people who didn’t pay enough attention in science class, and raise the blood pressure of people like my blog hosts with substanceless legal threats… and for what? Couldn’t all this effort, all this ingenuity, be used in the service of something real?

Oh, I’m sorry - that’d mean you’d actually have to earn your million-dollar cars, wouldn’t it?

Well, carry on then, I suppose.

A few readers have reminded me that tomorrow’s edition of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s venerable current affairs program Four Corners will be all about the Firepower saga.

You probably won’t even have to wait for someone to rip it off and make a torrent, as the ABC lets you download whole episodes of many shows, including Four Corners. I don’t think they’ve got any annoying geographic IP checking that’ll stop foreign readers from watching, either.

UPDATE: Here’s the episode, wittily entitled “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire”.

A reader brought my attention to Cracked’s 6 Retarded Gas Saving Schemes (People Are Actually Trying). I’ve could make a couple of minor technical complaints about it, but overall it’s great. The more people point out the idiocy of things like running your car on water and magic gasoline pills, the better.

I got a kick out of the Khaos Super Turbo Charger (KSTC), which apparently made as big a splash in the Philippines as Firepower did here in Australia. The KSTC has its very own page on fuelsaving.info; there’s another page about air-bleed devices in general.

Fuel scammers often seem to take the thirty-something per cent thermodynamic efficiency of internal combustion engines to mean that sixty-something per cent of the fuel isn’t being burned, when the actual amount of fuel that escapes the engine unburned or only partially combusted is a few per cent, at the very worst. For most vehicles today, it’s well under one per cent, as I noted when Firepower tried the same line on me.

Cracked’s number one Retarded Gas Saving Scheme is “Water4Gas” from one “Ozzie Freedom”. It’s a particularly elaborate kit of parts - including various aquarium components, and not one but two jam-jars - that’s meant to let you run your car at least partially on, that’s right, water.

I mention this in hopes of attracting some more of those hilarious Google ads from the several other water-fueled-car companies out there, all of which have mysteriously failed to make the trillions of dollars you’d expect.

(This is, of course, because of The Conspiracy. Which somehow doesn’t stop these people from selling their ridiculous kits to soon-to-be-disappointed customers.)

Oh, and meanwhile it’s come to light that the list of people to whom Firepower promised money and never delivered includes the Liberal Party of Australia.

At this stage I’m surprised that Tim Johnston - who in the photo accompanying the article has a hairstyle that looks not unlike a Brylcreemed ballsack - didn’t go door-to-door slipping IOUs into people’s letter boxes.

I’ve managed to go almost a month without saying anything about 2008’s uncontested See What Happens When You Don’t Pay Attention In Science Lessons, You Idiots gold medal winners, Firepower.

So here’s an update.

The Independent in the UK has a pretty good overview of the whole debacle, in “A miracle pill, a sports team and the most wanted man in Australia“. The New Zealand Herald has “Hunted fuel-pill peddler made same claim in NZ 16 years ago” - which wasn’t exactly a secret, but still the hopeful investors came thick and fast. For, I remind you, the chance to own their own little slice of a product that was not just different in no way at all from Firepower head Tim Johnston’s own previous scam in New Zealand, which was also different in no way at all from hundreds of previous products from other scam artists.

Meanwhile, making-a-career-out-of-Firepower Gerard Ryle co-authored the Sydney Morning Herald’s most recent piece, “Firepower’s Phileas Fogg steals away“. In which Tim Johnston manages to add a couple more creditors to the list by, for instance, skipping out on his flat in Hampstead with a month of rent still owing.

Also at the Herald, there’s “Western rugby joins the ruckus“, in which whoever at Western Australian Rugby Union drew the short straw glumly joins the hunt for Tim, because he owes them money too. Oh, and one Ross Graham, which the Firepower Web site is still happy to inform us is “the founder of Executive Traders and the owner of various private mining related companies”, is apparently personally owed nine point seven six million dollars.

I really hope Graham never gets a penny back. Look at him in that press release, saying “I sent members of my team to check out Firepower’s operations in Russia and Asia. They were impressed with what they saw, and realized these great products would enable Firepower to grow into a very successful business”.

I know that “quotes” like that in press releases are always written by the press guy and just initialed by the person who’s supposed to be “saying” it. But Graham nonetheless did approve the quote, took an active role in the Firepower scam, and never actually did do any due diligence despite saying that he had. No sane person could actually think the Firepower products worked if they really did “check out” Firepower’s essentially nonexistent Russian and Asian “operations”.

So, you know, screw that guy.

Moving on, the Herald also has “Firepower creditors home in on wife’s $5m property” and “Firepower boss rejected plan to restructure” (…possibly because part of that plan involved Tim Johnston turning himself in).

And, more juicily, “Firepower used fake tests to woo Russians“. Apparently after the faked tests were discovered and the Russian Railways network immediately cancelled their upcoming deal, Firepower had new tests done… and apparently correctly, too, because the new tests showed no effect. Oddly, these new tests weren’t added to Firepower’s motley collection of promotional literature.

Earlier, there was another Gerard Ryle piece, “Firepower offers pill franchise“, in which my friend Stephen Moss attempts to unload Firepower International, the company he used to be so proud of and which still, against all reason, has that picture of Stephen putting a pill in that bloody million-dollar Rolls-Royce on its front page.

Stephen says he’s owed money too - oh, poor baby! - and denies any involvement, blah blah blah.

Amazingly enough, Firepower franchises currently seem to be about as salable as Enron stock. Oh, and I couldn’t put it better than Ryle: “By coincidence, Bill Moss [Stephen’s dad…] was part of a Macquarie Bank consortium that sold the Sydney Kings to Johnston for $2 million last year. The deal gave the consortium a 500 per cent profit on the $400,000 it spent buying the Kings in 2002. The Firepower parent owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid endorsements to the Western Force and some of its players.”

So once again, Steve - if you’re short of a buck or two, try hitting up your dad for a loan!

Let’s see, what else have we got?

Magnate’s bid for Firepower fails (A mining zillionaire is one of the Firepower creditors and for some reason wanted to buy a controlling interest, but Tim Johnston popped up from his Undisclosed Location for long enough to say no.)

Owner of Sydney Kings faces arrest (Yep, that’s Tim again. It’s Firepower’s liquidator who wants Johnston arrested.)

There were two attempts to revive the Sydney Kings basketball team (the previous jewel in Firepower’s sports-sponsorship crown); they both failed, and there’s squabbling over the remnants.

Meanwhile, have you heard about the amazing Moletech Fuel Saver?

This time, for sure!

Can you just not get enough of my posts about Australian fuel-additive swindlers Firepower, but find it difficult to pick those posts out from the others in my Scams and Strange Tales categories?

Well, now your worries are over, because How To Spot A Psychopath has added - for no extra charge! - a whole separate Firepower category.

I hope this’ll help out the journalists who’ve been contacting me so entertainingly often for background info.

To save you all from yet another Firepower post, I’ll add the latest few articles about them to this one:

The law firm whose services Firepower retained to sue the Sydney Morning Herald and journalist Gerard Ryle for the articles Ryle wrote about them in 2007… has now filed an application in the Federal Court to wind up Firepower, and put the proceeds towards their unpaid bills.

The Sydney Kings, the basketball team Firepower sponsored, are now officially dead, with large outstanding debts.

So Tim Johnston, the high-rolling Firepower chief executive who’s recently, apparently, high-tailed it out of the country, is now in hiding from a number of very tall and muscular men, in addition to the usual collection of angry creditors.

I’m sorry about this Firepower Fest, but a Who Da Bitch Now? opportunity like this doesn’t come along every day.

Remember, gentle reader, how Firepower got hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from Austrade, the Australian Trade Commission?

(…and then hired as their new CEO one John Finnin, the Austrade guy who made the grants possible, among other even dodgier activities - and then fired him shortly afterward, when he was arrested as part of a child sex investigation, of all things…)

Well, now it turns out that the bright sparks at Austrade hired out consultants to Firepower at $190 an hour - one of whom also later joined the Firepower team… no, no conflicts of interest here, how dare you suggest such a thing!

But Austrade accidentally signed that consultancy deal with a Firepower “subsidiary” which didn’t actually exist.

(This seems to be a common problem for Firepower-associated business entities. I noticed yesterday that Stephen Moss’s “Global Fuel Technologies” does not seem to appear anywhere on the Australian Business Register.)

So now Austrade have joined the creditor chorus, as they try to get the $173,000 they’re owed back from any part of Firepower that retains a shred of reality.

Mind you, the Austrade contract said that Firepower had lots of hugely lucrative deals in the pipeline, and also that Firepower’s products had been “comprehensively tested by several world leading/independent testing institutes”. Which they, of course, hadn’t. So if you ask me, the whole contract was nothing but toilet paper from the moment it was printed and it serves Austrade right that they got completely screwed.

Since the money they were busy shovelling into Firepower’s pockets came from the Australian taxpayer, though, I still think it’d be rather nice if they managed to screw some of it back out of Firepower.

Perhaps Firepower could sell that million-dollar Rolls-Royce which Stephen Moss so proudly insisted was absolutely 100% Firepower property?

Hey, the picture of Stephen and “his” Roller is back up on the front page of buyfirepowerpill.com!

I imagine that’s a sight that really irritates the people who’re trying to get what they’re owed.

Thanks to Anthony Klan’s new piece in The Australian, I now have a few more pieces of the riveting Firepower jigsaw puzzle.

(And yes, that’s right, Firepower are now getting a kicking from the Murdoch press as well as the Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald.)

My bestest buddy Mr Stephen Moss is such a fresh-faced looking chap because he’s only twenty-three. And his father, Bill Moss, used to be the Head of the Banking and Property Group at Macquarie Bank.

Before he resigned from the bank, Bill Moss was part of a Macquarie Bank consortium that bought the Sydney Kings basketball team for $AU400,000, and then sold the team to Firepower for two million bucks. Nice work if you can get it.

Stephen’s own Firepower-but-not-Firepower business, whose name he never revealed to me, is apparently called Global Fuel Technologies.

That company name appears to only exist on pages having to do with Firepower. It is notably absent from the Australian Business Register.

And now Stephen’s unhappy, because he’s one of the numerous people to whom Firepower owe money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, he says.

Not to worry, Steve - I’m sure your dad’ll be happy to help you out. I hear he’s been doing rather well lately.