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I wrote, in 2010, about the miraculous Keseco Current Improvement System. It’s a power-saving device that’s claimed to work because of, in brief, technologies unknown to science.

I like this kind of power-saving box. Most power-savers are claimed to be some sort of power-factor corrector. Ones like the Keseco devices that’re supposed to work by “rotating electromagnetic waves” or “non-Hertzian frequencies” are more fun. They still don’t work, but at least they’re more original.

When I saw a new comment on the Keseco post today, I presumed it’d be one of the spammers who occasionally get through the net and spray ads for handbags or wristwatches all over my old posts.

I was wrong, though. It was this:

We are representing Ultra device, made by Keseco in EU market.
We do agree that claims to achieve superconductivity in wires seem to be unrealistic. And we partly agree with that. However we confirm that we have tested Ultra in various cases: domestic and industrial. We have used Chauvin Arnoux ca 8335 power analyzer to measure w,kva,kvar,Amps, U, harmonics, cos fi, etc. We confirm that Ultra device really works in reducing active power, reactive power, slightly improving cos fi.It reduces total consumption by 5-12%. The saving % depends on a number of factors.It does not turn wires into superconductors, but reduces energy loses in them.Detailed reports can be send upon request. Currently Keseco obtained SGS, TGM reports on saving. The patent they have for energy saving device is real.It is not for design, it is for energy saving.See: http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2003061097&recNum=1&docAn=KR2003000104&queryString=AN:PCT/KR03/00104&maxRec=1 . Ultra device really saves energy For more information on research works we have done with ultra,please, send request to :info@energita.lt.

Energita

If it’s all the same to you, unnamed Energita representative, I’ll just wait for this miraculous device to make you the billions of dollars you so richly deserve. Then I’ll be able to learn about it from, say, the paperwork for the Nobel Prize the Keseco designers have won, or the sticker on the side of the Keseco box that I, like everyone else in the world, will have purchased.

Just look at that patent. It’s for a box…

…with some busbars in it, the busbars only being connected to power at one end, and the inside of the box provided with some mysterious ceramic coating and “conductive plates” that aren’t electrically connected to anything.

And that’s it.

Conventional electrophysics says that this box, plugged in parallel with household mains power, will do nothing. It’s not even part of a circuit.

You allege that you have real evidence that it’s a power saver.

So now all you have to do is send these patented boxes to universities, technical colleges and appropriate governmental bodies until someone takes notice, and then here comes all that money and that definite Nobel Prize, for the staggering discovery of how “rotating electromagnetic waves” make the magic happen.

(Or the people who invented it could, after patenting their discovery, have written it up as a scientific paper. Get it published and the results replicated, then sell licenses, and you could become billionaires without having to actually manufacture anything at all.)

You’d think that in the several years the Keseco device has been around, they’d have managed to do this. But instead, just like every other magic power saver or magic gasoline pill, the devices are sold piecemeal to whatever end-users can be persuaded to buy one.

Electrical components that aren’t connected to anything are strangely popular in scientifically… novel… devices and talismans.

Inside the “EMPower Modulator“, for instance…

…are three aluminium plates that aren’t connected to anything.

The “Q-Link Pendant“…

…is similarly electrically innovative. And now we’ve got this Keseco box-of-nothing, too.

Energita sell a few other odd devices (machine-translated English version).

This power-monitoring system (translated) seems kosher, as do these light bulbs (translated), and I think this gadget (translated) may be OK too; it seems to be some sort of improved thermostat for freezers.

But then there’s something called a “Fuel Activator” (translated), magnetic fuel improvers (translated) and, of course, the Keseco doodad (translated).

I’m never sure what to think when someone who sells these sorts of products remonstrates with me. I presume they quite often, especially when they’re a reseller instead of the originator of the product, actually believe what they’re saying. They’re seldom abusive or clearly mentally peculiar.

There but for the grace of critical thinking, I suppose.

I love it when I don’t have to go looking for an interestingly fishy business proposal, because some obliging organisation mails it to me.

(It’s even better than unsolicited crank e-mail.)

Strictly speaking, this one wasn’t actually mailed to me, but to my partner Anne. It wasn’t precisely aimed at her, either; they had our old address right, but if the recipient’s name had been Norma Jeane Baker, the letter would have been addressed to Jeane Norma Baker.

So anyway, it’s from an outfit called “CollectionPoint“, and they’re pleased to tell Anne that there’s $AU887.50 waiting for her in an undisclosed location. Apparently CollectionPoint do debt recovery too, for a fee of 25% plus GST. They don’t quote a fee for this other kind of money recovery, but I think it’s safe to say it’s not small.

We’re not exactly rolling in dough at the moment, so a forgotten nest-egg could be quite handy.

(Do send me some money if you feel like it. We’re hardly on the bread-line, though; I assure you that the lights will stay on, the cats will still get their little tins of fancy fish and the freeloading cockatoos will get their seed without your kind assistance.)

The questions that immediately occurred to me were, of course, “does this money actually exist?”, and “is this outfit charging a fee for something you can do quite easily yourself?”

The answers to these questions are surprising and unsurprising, respectively.

“Unclaimed money” has been a scam-artist favourite for a long, long time. Unexpected inheritances. Prizes in lotteries you never even entered. A permutation in which the money may not actually strictly speaking be yours, but a morally upstanding person says you can still get hold of it, for a price. Some sort of purported government involvement. The list goes on.

The unclaimed-money business has even spawned meta-scams, in which the sucker pays for an information pack or franchise opportunity or something so they can start a work-at-home business finding unclaimed judicial judgements, or whatever, and creaming off a fat commission.

But CollectionPoint actually are telling us about money we really can claim. We’ll claim it as soon as we can make a big enough pile of ID documents.

CollectionPoint are also, however, offering to take people’s money to help them do something that is not actually difficult to do - or at least not significantly more difficult to do - by yourself.

The Australian government has a site called “Moneysmart” that’ll point you at various unclaimed-money searches. Anne found the money CollectionPoint are talking about via the NSW Office of State Revenue site. Which is presumably the same way CollectionPoint found it.

So CollectionPoint do provide a helpful service. They alert you to the existence of money you probably can actually collect. And then you can throw the CollectionPoint letter away and go and collect your money the free way. CollectionPoint do not appear to be breaking any laws.

Well, they’re not breaking any laws right now, anyway. The Australian Government’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs are happy to list CollectionPoint on their scam information page - apparently CollectionPoint sent letters to war widows claiming to be acting on behalf of that Department. And it’s not hard to find other people talking about CollectionPoint in not-entirely-complimentary terms.

CollectionPoint come off pretty well in this blog post, for instance, until several allegedly separate people show up in the comments, all loudly defending CollectionPoint and all suffering from a suspicioulsy similar inability to construct a sentence, or in many cases even a word.

CollectionPoint also score themselves a mention in this Age article; apparently CollectionPoint have sent out follow-up letters implying - but not exactly actionably saying - that if you don’t use their services, you’ll miss out on the money altogether.

A commenter here says that after a CollectionPoint letter put him onto some money he could claim, and he claimed it himself without using CollectionPoint’s services, CollectionPoint sent him a bill.

This bloke says CollectionPoint offered to collect $500 owing to him for a mere $160 - a 32% fee. Even Today Tonight doesn’t like them.

Oh, and according (PDF) to the Consumer Action Law Centre, CollectionPoint charged a 25% fee for recovering some unclaimed superannuation money for an elderly client after he provided them with the identifying information he could have used to get the money back for free. But then CollectionPoint jacked up the 25% fee by adding another 10% GST charge (so 27.5%, altogether). The Consumer Action Law Centre took the case to court, and (another PDF) the Victorian Civil Administration Tribunal decided that CollectionPoint were indeed gouging their client, and reduced the fee payable to CollectionPoint by 45%.

The funny part, though, was that in response to this lawsuit CollectionPoint filed their own, in the same court, against the Consumer Action Law Centre’s lawyers. They alleged “misleading and deceptive conduct” and an obscure kind of defamation, “injurious falsehood”, which is becoming less obscure after recent reforms to defamation law in Australia.

In my non-lawyerly estimation, I think the result of this counter-suit can fairly be described as “widespread puzzlement”.

So anyway, we’re getting our eight hundred and something bucks.

CollectionPoint won’t see a penny of it.

A reader writes:

I was wondering if you have come across “Water Ion Technologies” before. My skills tend towards electronics or I.T., and about the most interesting thing I ever did with chemicals probably wasn’t that good for me at the time. I know you’re not really a chemical science site, although, in fairness, you seem to derive some small amounts of schadenfreude from debunking some of the more obvious pseudoscience shysters that inhabit the ‘net. God knows I do when you do it.

So… Should I be super excited about what they’re saying, or do I need to take more of those chemicals before their vision will fit into my reality?

Richard

Usually, purveyors of magic water at least somewhat restrict their claims.

Usually, it’s good for what ails you. Either it’s treated with magnets or dual overhead quantum recipulating sprines, or it’s just some mildly alkaline spring water that the seller declares to be Water Of Gladness or whatever. And away they go selling the stuff, come what may.

Or perhaps it’s not of medical value, but you can run your car on it.

Or it’s not water at all, but separated hydrogen and oxygen that for ill-described reasons has properties far more useful than the hydrogen and oxygen dealt with by boring old scientists.

Water Ion Technologies seem to have opted for “all of the above”.

Their main discovery, you see, is a mystic substance called “SG Gas“, which is not H₂O but “O-HH”, and has a long list of properties that’ll pretty much overturn the entirety of molecular chemistry if they turn out to be real.

(The Water Ion Technologies “science” page also, according to ancient psychoceramic tradition, rambles on about the patents they’ve applied for, as if having a patent on something means that the thing works.)

But wait! If you “infuse” water with SG Gas, you get “Ultra-Pure Polarized Water“, also known as the “AquaNew” product Aqua Cura “Watt-Ahh”, which combines at least five forms of pseudoscience to provide 100% of your daily requirements of whatever the hell it is they’re talking about.

(Actual scientists may find the Watt-Ahh “Studies” page particularly entertaining. Watt-Ahh doesn’t have anything but water in it, oxyhydrogen doesn’t kill cells, capacitance testing somehow proves they’re really making “clustered water”, now suddenly their nothing-but-water product is supposed to kill germs although that’s not actually what they did with it to reach this conclusion, and now, surprise, it’s a treatment for autism! And good for cut flowers. And on it goes.)

If this were the first miracle hydrogen-oxygen gas, or the first miracle water, promoted with a well-tossed salad of quantum flapdoodle, crackpot physics and claims about “hydration”, “cellular communication”, “detoxification”, and so on, then I might be inclined to give them slightly longer shrift. Heck, they’ve even got one study done by a real scientist at a real university… using their own odd in-vitro protocol. But c’mon, it beats the heck out of the tests in which they forget to tell you the results.

The thing is, though, that mysterious hydrogen-oxygen gases are a long-term crank favourite. Often described as “HHO” or “Brown’s Gas”, they’re forever allowing people to get a thousand miles per gallon or burn the gas to get back more energy than they used making it, except when some tiresome empiricist shows up and tries to actually test these claims.

And as for magic water, well, your one-stop shop for an overview of the surprisingly large number of magic-water products out there is “H₂O dot con“. Their page about water cluster quackery goes into claims like the “Watt-Ahh” ones in some detail; Watt-Ahh has its own little entry on the depressingly long list of similar products and devices.

Could this stuff be real? Sure, insofar as the claims made for it are even physically possible.

Since this is another potentially world-changing product that’s mysteriously being sold piecemeal to individual consumers rather than turning into a multi-billion-dollar business, though, I see no reason to give it any more credence than any of the many, many, many other products in the same market sector.

A reader writes:

I’ve read all your various fuel-additive debunking pieces, and while I’m assuming that this is Just One More Of The Same, I would like your opinion:

http://www.ecofuelsaver.com/

Big, flashy web page. Graphics and embedded videos. And not only testimonials, but actual Lab Results!!!

The How It Works web page sounds awfully dodgy to me, though, and the FAQ page makes me even more skeptical. On the other hand, they go to great lengths to differentiate themselves from being just another engine cleaner, and give myriad details about how to properly do testing so you can see the results for yourself. Also, the information given in their “EPA & CARB certified Lab Results” page is big on scientific rigor, discussing the need for consistent baseline runs and blind testing so the driving habits do not affect the outcome. (Of course, it could all be made-up hooey, but that’s the chance we take.)

Point is, they sound good. And the product is being sold by Canadian Tire, a very large Canadian retail outlet.

(Canadian Tire is an institution in Canada. They are a Wal-Mart like store, but have been around for some 90 years. For 50 years have a ’store loyalty’ program called Canadian Tire money, where some small percentage of your purchase is refunded to you in Canadian Tire Money. This ‘money’ is of *very* high quality; it is, in fact, better (better paper and ink, stronger security measures) than the national currency of some countries I have travelled. It is gladly accepted by charities, frequently given in larger denominations as wedding gifts, and is often used as a sort of alternate currency, trading at par among friends or even friendly strangers. Thus endeth the lesson.)

Anyway, since Canadian Tire is endorsing the stuff, I expect that many folks are going to be trying it. I know you have seen many scams of this nature, so I beseech you to train your skeptical and knowledgeable eyes on this potential snake-oil from the Great White North.

Shane

Yeah, here we go again.

This outfit does indeed have a better spiel than most fuel-additive sellers, but there on their How It Works page is the usual claptrap about raising octane rating.

Raising a fuel’s octane rating above what an engine’s compression ratio and ignition timing requires will, for an absolute certainty, do nothing at all, and certainly not improve an “incomplete burn”, a concept which the Eco Fuel Saver people also share with dozens, if not hundreds, of other fuel-additive companies.

Modern engines all burn very very nearly all of the fuel, or else they fail emission testing and/or set the catalytic converter on fire.

And on it goes, blah blah blah, and then there are those nifty PDF test datasheets you mentioned - which are, once again, of a quality well above the norm for these outfits, and not even from California Environmental Engineering!

This post has been sitting on my to-do pile for rather a while; when I first replied to Shane I observed that the “Gasoline” test-results document said that the tests were done in 2006. And here we were, years later, and this hundred-billion-dollar product was still being sold over the counter to individual motorists. On account, perhaps, of a Conspiracy.

Now they’ve got documents from 2011 on the lab-results page, though, and all they say is that their additive doesn’t ruin the fuel, and in fact changes it in almost no way at all. Then, puzzled, you might try their “Results” page instead, but all you’ll find there is a list of variably plausible excuses for the additive doing nothing noticeable. But don’t be fooled - Eco Fuel Saver will “increase BTU, octane and lubricity in your fuel”, so never mind our own PDF test results that proudly indicate an octane change, for instance, of less than half of one per cent, and the fact that even a large octane increase makes no difference unless your current fuel is causing knock or making your fancy computer-controlled engine retard its spark; just clap your hands, children, and wait for Tinkerbell.

I could dig further into this, but it’s like investigating every new prophecy of the end of the world or dude who reckons he’s channelling a million-year-old alien, yet is mysteriously unable to even tell you pi to ten significant digits, let alone anything of scientific interest that millions of human high-schoolers don’t already know.

It’s up to the makers of all of these products to demonstrate the value of their incredibly valuable, if true, claims. It’s not up to us to sort through the numerous claimants and their countless claims to see whether perhaps, this time, the magical mileage elixir or perpetual-motion machine is real.

The fact that Canadian Tire sell this product indicates, I think, that Canadian Tire reckon people will buy it. Similarly, Wal-Mart sells those magical “Power Balance” wrist bands (and several similar products, not to mention a particularly spiffy-looking magical engine potion).

And just about every pharmacy sells homeopathic remedies (as does Walmart!). And so on, and so forth.

Thanks, once again, to all you readers and your ceaseless campaign to make me sad and irritable, I now know that a couple of days ago that jewel in Australia's investigative-reporting crown, A Current Affair, ran a story about yet another bloody "power saver".

You can see the five-minute ACA segment here.

(Pleasingly, as I write this, the comments on that page are overwhelmingly negative. I've only clicked the "10 more comments" button a couple of times, but thus far it's the sanest comment thread I've ever seen on a mainstream-media site.)

This latest magic electricity talisman is the "Oz Power Saver", the Web site for which is immensely proud of the ACA story, but oddly bereft of further information. You can't even buy one. All you can do is "register your interest".

The basic claims on the site are par for the energy-saver course, though. "Save up to 25% off your electricity bills", "reduces energy usage", and the inevitable "guarantee".

That ACA video fills in the rest of the blanks, with the same stuff we've seen over and over from other magic-box salesmen.

Like the guarantee, for instance, which this time says that they'll refund the purchase price if you don't save at least the Oz Power Saver's purchase price in three years.

It would be churlish and tendentious of me to point out that scam-gadgets, definitely including "power savers", almost always have alleged money-back guarantees, and that power-saver hucksters have a tendency to spawn new businesses rather more frequently than once every three years.

So I shall, of course, not point that out.

On goes the video, dum de dum, it's "already a huge hit in the US and Europe", here's a testimonial from the "one lucky family" in all of Australia who've had the chance to try the thing out, here's no testimonial from anybody equipped to test it properly, "big energy users like factories and hotels have been using this technology for years"... all right, I reckon we're ready for an atrociously mangled explanation of power factor, and power-factor correction, now.

Ah, there it is.

The ACA explanation actually starts out well, with a double-sine-wave depiction of the voltage/current phase relationship, but then spears off into the bushes with some gibberish about the phase relationship getting messed up as the electricity "travels to your home". (Later on, they tell us that the further you are from a distribution transformer, the worse your power will be.)

It's actually reactive loads that mess up power factor, not the length of wire between your house and a pole-pig transformer. But, more importantly, the people who worry about power factor are the suppliers of the electricity, not its consumers.

To try to get my umpteenth repetition of this lecture out of the way as quickly as possible:

1: There are many, many "power saver" products on the market. Most are little plug-in things, but there are also versions like the Oz Power Saver that are hard-wired in the breaker box. Actually, there are some that're very, very like the Oz Power Saver, to the point of looking exactly the same, as we'll see in a moment.

2: There is no known way for devices like this to work. Power-factor correction is a real thing, but it is completely impossible for it to save a domestic power consumer any money at all, even if their house has a lousy aggregate power factor, which it almost certainly doesn't.

3: The reason why it can't save you any money is that domestic (and most commercial) power consumers aren't billed for a bad power factor. Domestic (and most commercial) power meters can't even detect a bad power factor. Promoters of these gadgets always come up with some sort of tortured pseudoscientific word-salad that suggests that your electricity meter actually measures the "bad electricity" or "dirty power" or whatever that the magic box cures, but this is not actually the case unless you're running a factory full of motors, and it's not always the case even then.

Back to the Oz Power Saver.

I applied the terrifying black-hat hacker firepower of the TinEye image search to...

...this picture of the product, on the Oz Power Saver site. Whaddayaknow, there was the same image...

...being used on numerous sites selling the good old Power-Save 1200!

Now, the Oz Power Saver can't be the exact same thing as the Power-Save 1200, because the Power-Save 1200 is a US product, and Australia's mains voltage is twice that of the USA.

(Well, OK, it could be the exact same product, if it contains auto-sensing multi-voltage circuitry, or no circuitry at all, which latter situation turns out to be not far from the truth for certain products in this market sector. I don't think either is likely in this case, though.)

One quite marked difference between the Oz Power Saver and the Power-Save 1200 is price. The Power-Save 1200 is about a $US300 product, while the Oz Power Saver, according to the cheerful distributor in the ACA story, revels in a price of eight hundred and ninety-five Australian dollars, which is about the same number of US dollars, as I write this.

But it's guaranteed to save you at least that much in three years, et cetera et cetera.

In the ACA-story demonstration of the Oz Power Saver's incredible qualities, we get to see the traditional Wooden Partition with Wires and Motors On It, and the similarly traditional Cheap 'N' Dodgy Power Meter (sometimes replaced by one or more $10 multimeters) giving its imaginative impression of the power factor of a load.

The demo load manages to achieve a truly miserable power factor of 0.39 according to said meter, which leaps to 0.87 when the Oz Power Saver's activated.

These power-factor numbers may actually be accurate, since the test load appears to be a free-spinning unloaded AC motor, which can be counted on to have a crappy power factor. AC motors that're matched passably well to their load, like most AC motors in the world, can be expected to have a much better power factor. Power tools - electric drills, angle grinders - may have a lousy PF when they're spinning free, but you'll have to spend rather a lot of time standing there grinning at a free-spinning drill bit for that load to make any significant difference to your residence's aggregate power factor.

More realistically, washing machines and tumble-dryers may sometimes have lousy power factor, because different loads of washing mean different loads on the motors. But you'd, again, have to do rather a lot of washing for this to make a significant difference to your home's aggregate power factor, and even if you do, it won't cost you any more money, because residential customers aren't billed by power factor. (Just in case you forgot that.)

Shortly after the cheap-electricity-meter demo, A Current Affair's piece on the Oz Power Saver suddenly switches to an update on a story from last year, about some blokes who make a whole different power-saving thingy, the "Futurewave Energy Saver". Which I immediately, of course, assumed would be another box of pure uncut pixie dust. But which I suspect is actually kosher.

The Futurewave device is alleged to reduce the power consumption of swimming-pool pumps, and some other similar motors. It isn't a magic power-factor box, though; it's a speed-control device, that according to the FAQ saves actual real power, instead of confusedly-described apparent power, by just running the pool pump at reduced speed for most of the pool-cleaning cycle, when full power isn't actually required.

This seems as if it might actually work. I don't know if it does, but it seems to have no arguments with the laws o' physics, or of electricity billing.

Next, the ACA story whiplashes back to the Oz Power Saver, and cheerfully informs us that the Oz Power Saver will "do the same" for "anything with a motor".

So presumably you'd be a total idiot to buy the Futurewave product, that only works for pool pumps.

God, I'd be irritated if I were the Futurewave people. It'd be like taking the time to build a comfortable and safe 80-mile-per-gallon car, and then finding yourself lost in a vast mob of hucksters selling cars that run on water.

I'm not holding my breath for a regulatory agency to do anything about the Oz Power Saver. It is, for a start, not actually on sale yet, and the regulators are overworked and understaffed. Scams that don't actively kill people often don't get a very high priority.

Here, to cheer us all up a bit, is the Australian government slapping down one of the many plug-in power savers, called the Enersonic Power Saver, which I mention here and here.

The Australian Consumers' Association were so impressed with another plug-in power saver, the "Reegen Micro-Plug" that they gave it a Shonky Award. And here are those nice people who sold one of these things until they realised it was a scam, then said sorry. They, along with some non-Australian examples are mentioned at the end of this old post.

My offer from the end of that post still stands. If the Oz Power Saver people want to contact me about installing one of their boxes at my house, preferably with a nice Frankenstein knife switch so I can switch it in and out of the circuit at will just as they do in their demo, I will test it with various household motor loads and will immediately recant all of the above if the Oz Power Saver turns out to do a damn thing.

A new high point in PayPal-money-request audacity:

What, you might wonder, does “Login and Learn” have to say for themselves in the money-request message?

Note from merchant:
Please make payment in full. All sevices will continue once payment is made. A dynamic new innovation for helping thhe less fortunate.

This guy tried a strange sort of attenuated advance-fee-fraud bait; “Login and Learn” appears to have a similar strange strategy, but based around… a bogus educational charity, I guess?

I wonder if I’ll ever get one of these weird requests for an even larger sum than this.

(Now you jokers’ll all be sending me trillion-dollar invoices, won’t you?)

A piquant little spamlet to ring in the new year:

To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: Ad Request…
From: Jami
Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2011 21:07:50 +0700 (ICT)

Good Day,

Our company is interested in placing the below employment ad with your Newspaper today. We want you to get back to us with the cost to run our ad= for 3 weeks in Newspaper and print.

OUR AD COPY AS TO BE PLACED:

WE ARE SEEKING DYNAMIC RECEPTIONIST ORIENTED INDIVIDUALS WITH GREAT COMMU
NICATIONS AND
TYPING SKILLS NEEDED TO WORK ON BEHALF OF COMPANY THIS SERVICE REPRESENTA
TIVE WILL EARN UP TO
$2000 MONTHLY ANY JOB EXPERIENCE NEEDED.EMAIL US AT: resume20111@hotmail
.com IF INTERESTED

Also, let me know if you do print category such as Yahoo Hot jobs, Monster,Carrier-builder OR ANY JOB SITE you have.Do you accept Visa or Master Credit Card, identify the type you accept.

I await the above quotation asap.

Best Regards,
Jami Erickson

I’ll be sure to pass this on to my Carrier-building friends, “Jami”! They’ll get back to you very soon about conventional versus nuclear power, aircraft complement and so on.

The only real question in my mind is whether this spammer and his how-dare-you-suggest-it-might-be-stolen credit card number is really trying to place these dodgy job ads, or whether it’s just another attempt to get suckers directly, by waiting for replies that say “actually I’m not a newspaper, but boy, that job sounds sweet!”

Could be both, I suppose. Either way, the jobs themselves will surely turn out to be the usual money-mule or “deposit this fake cheque and then send us some real money” sort of scam.

The “if you do print category” word-salad also reminds me of the odd use of the word “do” in many African spam-scams, such as the immortal “and if you do accept credit card“.

Remember when the Sydney Morning Herald published that article saying how awesome the Moletech (or possibly MTECH) Fuel Saver was, when that device was of course actually just another useless magic talisman?

And then the online version of the article was erased, in a rather weird way?

And then the paper favoured me with a ten-word non-explanation about what had happened?

(I’m still waiting for Asher Moses, the author of the Moletech article, to reply to my e-mail about it. It’s been almost three years now.)

Well, that’s how newspaper Web sites work these days, apparently. ‘Cos, a couple of days ago, the Daily Telegraph (another Australian paper) published that paean to the all-round gosh-darned fabulousness of the “Q-Link Mini” self-adhesive radiation-absorbing tiger-repelling antigravity eternal-life cure for the common cold.

And now they’ve… unpublished it again.

Ze page, she is not found.

It was foolish of me to think that a major publication wouldn’t be so shameless as to do this, after I’d already seen a different major publication do it. Next time, I’m keeping a backup of the page. (Google still indexes umpteen traces of the article on other dailytelegraph.com.au pages, but the text of the article itself is lost.)

This is the normal way in which defamatory or otherwise objectionable material is dealt with on the Web. We all know about the Streisand Effect vastly increasing the readership of any material that someone unlikable wants kept secret. But in situations when someone has valid grounds for objection to something on the Web, the outraged party usually just shouts at the offender a bit, whereupon the offender takes down the page full of lies about the sexual habits of Joe Bloggs, or the review that was copied wholesale from someone else’s site, or whatever. There often isn’t even a legal nastygram involved.

But this is not how it should work for major publishers. Even if the Q-Link Mini piece was never published on paper (I don’t read the Telegraph - anybody see it on the actual fishwrap?), the greater public respect that “proper” publishers are meant to have (I’ll wait for the laughter to die down…) means that, at the very least, they should do one of those one-square-inch-on-page-19 retraction/apologies. Not just silently delete the Web page.

I wonder, as a commenter on the last post pointed out, whether attention from the Mirror Universe evil twin of Media Watch had anything to do with this unannounced retraction.

[Update: As pointed out in the comments, Media Watch has covered the story now as well!]

As that Crikey piece points out at the end and as this Crikey piece explains in detail, it turns out that Stephen Fenech’s footballer brother Mario is paid to promote Q-Link products. Which, to be fair, Mario probably sincerely believes are effective. This continues the great tradition of incisive critical thinking we’ve come to expect from sports stars.

(The second Crikey article also links to this page, where someone wades through the alleged scientific support for Q-Link claims, so you don’t have to.)

Entertainingly, a search for the names of the two brothers currently turns up rather a lot of people talking about this Q-Link nonsense. You could probably piece the whole article back together from the sections of it quoted on blogs and Twitter.

While I waited for an apology from Stephen Fenech and/or the Daily Telegraph (or Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, for that matter, because that seems about as likely), I was wondering what the heck Stephen was thinking when he wrote that piece. Did he, I wondered, imagine that the preposterousness of the product would distract people from the giant conflict of interest? Perhaps Mario’s the smart one in that family?

But no, that wasn’t it. Stephen actually thought he’d get away with this because he’s done it twice before.

Here and here, courtesy of the Australian Q-Link site’s “In The Media” page, are Mr Fenech’s two previous proud declarations of belief in the incredible powers of Sympathetic Resonance Technology. Both published in the Telegraph.

How often do you have to do this to be eligible for a Lifetime Achievement Bent Spoon Award?

A round of applause, gentle readers, for Stephen Fenech, "Technology Writer" for the Daily Telegraph here in Australia, for his unflinchingly courageous presentation of the "Q-Link Mini".

The Mini is a tiny self-adhesive object which, Mr Fenech assures us, is "powerful enough to shield us from the potentially harmful electromagnetic radiation generated by mobile phones and other electronic devices". (Q-Link themselves delightfully refer to the Mini as a "Wellness Button".)

Not for Mr Fenech the mealy-mouthed objections of hide-bound so-called "scientists", who've observed that there's no good reason to suppose that low-level exposure to non-ionising electromagnetic radiation has any deleterious effects, and that there's also no good reason to suppose that there is even a theoretical basis for low-energy EMR to harm us, and that if you block the radiation coming out of a mobile phone, the phone won't work any more.

Mr Fenech is similarly wisely unconcerned that Q-Link's most famous product, the "SRT-2 Pendant", contains a copper coil that isn't connected to anything, and a surface-mount zero-ohm resistor, which is also not connected to anything.

I'm sure Mr Fenech disregards doubts raised by this discovery because, of course, Q-Link's products are unconstrained by the foolish fantasies of orthodox "science", which has somehow come by the idiotic idea that the existence of microwave ovens, GPS satellites and personal computers might indicate a more accurate understanding of the principles by which the universe operates than that possessed by the manufacturers of mystic talismans supported by testimonial evidence, uncontrolled user tests and the sorts of studies that cause spikes in the blood pressure of "scientists" who work so hard to get their own papers published because, of course, their papers are mere tissues of lies that never mention "biomeridians" or "Applied Kinesiology"...

...which is here discussed in a way clearly calculated to underhandedly attack Q-Link's products!

If you buy something that's meant to operate by "Sympathetic Resonance Technology™" or "non-Hertzian frequencies", you should of course take it back for a refund if it turns out not to contain seemingly-meaningless components that aren't connected to anything. Those components are where the magic happens, people!

Now, I know that some of you are the sort of raving "science"-worshippers that won't take Mr Fenech's word by itself as proof that the Q-Link Mini is worth $US24.95 - or even $AU48, which for some reason is what it costs here.

Rest assured, all you Moon-landing conspirators and Nazi doctors, that Mr Fenech has diligently secured supportive quotes from the entirely unbiased CEO of Q-Link Australia, and also a naturopath called Daniel Taylor, who appears to be a practitioner of the "Dorn Method", which regrettably does not seem to have anything to do with being knocked out to demonstrate how dangerous the latest threat to the Enterprise D is.

I don't believe a study's yet been done to determine what happens if you use one of those antenna-enhancing stickers at the same time as a Q-Link Mini. Be warned that adding a battery-enhancing sticker and a Guardian Angel battery may result in headache, irritable bowels or time travel.

A reader writes:

Hi Dan,

In Melbourne we have been observing small white hand-written signs popping up on the sides of roads affixed to all sorts of posts and street signs.

The signs are all similar and say:

www.katrinamurray.com
Lucrative Business

I’ve had a look at the site, and my “3 scroll page alarm” went off; any page with more than 3 vertical pages makes me suss.

The site never describes exactly what the business is.

Is there a name for these things? Are they common? This is the first I have come across.

Nathan

Yes, they’re common.

The deal is, there’s some company like Herbalife or something with a bunch of “distributors” who, even when they strenuously protest that they aren’t in the multi-level marketing business, do seem to chiefly be selling the opportunity to sell the opportunity to sell the opportunity to sell, et cetera, whatever nominal product is hiding somewhere within that vast sky-scraping trapezoid.

It’s normal for all of the “distributors” to never mention the name of the particular trapezoid they’re part of, but those classic endless “squeeze pages” often contain a subtle clue or two that the offer they’re presenting is not quite as extraordinary as they say.

Just paste a phrase or three from such a page into Google, and see how many other people are offering the same amazing opportunity!

(It’s easy to find duplicated testimonials, but you should also search for excerpts of the text allegedly written by the person who’s making this particular never-to-be-repeated offer.)

"I ran my previous business for a little over 4 years and pretty much lost all my money." ("About 8,510 results" as I write this, but that’s a huge over-estimate, because Google doesn’t actually give accurate figures for string searches like this. Paging on through the results ends up with exactly 293 results, at the moment. Remember to click the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" link at the end of the original results, if you want to see how many pages Google actually indexes with your search string on ‘em, including ones that’re so similar to others that Google doesn’t bother displaying them by default.)

"I left on my terms and it occurred due to this wonderful opportunity. Now I work for myself" (120 results)

"not afraid to try new things, I also had a willingness to learn" (This one actually seems to be unique to katrinamurray.com!)

"Imagine not having to beg for time off to do something so simple" (374 results, with a couple of differing opinions about what sport your putative son will be playing.)

"such a great group of people who are willingly assisting me" (Only two hits, again with variation of the words on either side; there’ll be three hits when Google indexes this post. Few-hits searches like this one may be helpful in tightening the Venn-diagram intersection of all these get-rich-quick squeeze pages to figure out which of them, if any, are not trying to sell the same product.)

"further, I’d like to tell you what to watch out for. Too many" (228 results)

"bombarding them with constant sales pitches about how much money they" (268 results)

"Associates who have taken advantage of the opportunity I’m offering you have generated multiple streams of income" (215 results)

"This is a real, legitimate, Internet marketing system. The system works perfectly as long as you follow it exactly" (Well, obviously! Why would there be five thousand, one hundred and ninety copies of this text on the Web, if it weren’t real and legitimate!?)

And, finally, "The testimonials presented are applicable to the individuals depicted and may not be representative of the experience of others." Wise words to live by - so very wise, in fact, that 346 Web pages contain them!

I’m absolutely 100% sure, of course, that katrinamurray.com is completely on the level and offering a real opportunity to sell worthwhile products that everybody needs.

But if you sign up for this particular incredible home business opportunity, you’ll still have a problem, because there are obviously a large number of other people in the same damn business. Unless you have a scroll of genocide that allows you to annihilate all of the other functionally, and often literally, identical such opportunities floating around down in the noise floor of our wonderful capitalist world, you’re likely to find that no matter how much you hassle your friends, relatives and employees, it’s just mathematically impossible to get enough customers to make the big bucks you’ve been promised.

Perhaps the reason why the actual product is never mentioned on the squeeze page is that it’s an amazing new discovery with a whole new wide-open market, and the sellers don’t want to give away the secret.

When hundreds of other squeeze pages say the exact same thing, though, this theory seems a little shaky to me.