This week businessman James McCormick was convicted of fraud after making £50m selling fake bomb detectors to security forces in Iraq and many other countries around the world. The detectors were said to work in a similar way to dowsing rods and were claimed to detect explosives up to one kilometre below the ground. Even more incredibly, they could apparently be used to locate drugs, people, elephants ? even $100 bills. They didn't work and, in all probability, hundreds of lives were lost as a result of misplaced trust in the phoney devices.

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