Court dismisses fraud case over bogus GT200 bomb detectors

[Thian]

35 minutes ago, jayboy said:

.The reaction from most astute Thais will be to presume there was some corruption but nothing too unusual.Let it pass.

 

Last week i told my wife that the Thai claimed that Spain sold them inferiour vaccines against rabies and that was the cause of the recent outbreak. She replied: Oh just like the UK sold us the fake bombdetectors....I told her it was an army scam (didn't know the full story) since i trusted the UK, but now i realise that she was right.

 

Yet the scam lasted for years. It made British fraudsters millions of pounds - in thousands of sales across several continents.

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-29459896

[Eric Loh]

2 hours ago, mikebell said:

The Thai procurement committee is guilty of malfeasance and/or stupidity and should be made accountable publicly.  Oh...they were in the army!

Anupong Paochinda signed the GT200 procurement (also the dud blimp). So erase that thought of slapping a malfeasance charge against the current Interior Minister of a junta government and a senior member of the Burapha brotherhood. 

[mike324]

maybe the army should just shop at toys rus, heck metal detectors there even have higher reliability! lol

[geriatrickid]

Too many people could have been embarrassed.

[CliffH]

How many innocent people were convicted on the 'evidence' provided by these bogus devices, and how many of them are still languishing in jail?

[baboon]

1 hour ago, Thian said:

 

Last week i told my wife that the Thai claimed that Spain sold them inferiour vaccines against rabies and that was the cause of the recent outbreak. She replied: Oh just like the UK sold us the fake bombdetectors....I told her it was an army scam (didn't know the full story) since i trusted the UK, but now i realise that she was right.

 

Yet the scam lasted for years. It made British fraudsters millions of pounds - in thousands of sales across several continents.

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-29459896

You can no more blame the UK collectively than you can Thailand if a Thai national picks your pocket anywhere in the world. 

[lvr181]

Corruption and stupidity knows no bounds! 

 

As has been demonstrated many times before. And the worst news is that no-one seems to learn or (while money is involved) want to learn.

 

MONEY IS GOD in the Kingdom. 

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

5 hours ago, JOC said:

And as usual.....No one is responsible.....

 

 

Clearly the manufacturer and suppliers of the device are guilty of fraud -- even if the Thai court doesn't think so.

 

But IMHO, equally guilty are those bringing these legal cases (the military) who strenuously insisted against all contrary evidence that the detectors were real and spent gobs of public funds buying them for this country.

 

Who's suing THEM for fraud?

 

I'm no scientist or electronics expert. But if someone handed me a supposed bomb detector and told me it didn't need a power source because it would function with the electrical current from my body, I'd laugh them out of the room...

 

Are people really that stupid? Or, they didn't much care, because some goodly portion of the procurement funds was being rebated into people's pockets?

 

 

Edited March 29, 2018 by TallGuyJohninBKK

[metisdead]

Posts containing profanity have been removed. 

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

5 hours ago, canopy said:

Others around the world easily rejected this device outright as a scam by simple testing. It wasn't even necessary to open the device to see the phony internals. There is some questions of competency that the military would buy so many of any type of gadget without checking to see if and how well it worked first.

 

Ya think!!!!! 

[lvr181]

20 minutes ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

buying them for this country.

Nah - buying them so that some people can enrich themselves from the process. AKA brown bags.

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

3 minutes ago, Father Fintan Stack said:

 

Not from me, I know they are wholly incompetent. 

Hey, that comment wasn't from me...

 

My comment was only.....       

[lvr181]

1 minute ago, Father Fintan Stack said:

 

Not from me, I know they are wholly incompetent. 

  As does most of the western world and probably some from other parts of Asia as well. 

[cyberfarang]

The advertisement also claimed the GT200 detector could detect ammunition, explosives, drugs, gold, ivory, currency and tobacco, even if the items were buried. But unfortunately for the Thai Armed forces Security Centre, the devices could not detect BS.

 

Once bitten twice shy, an expensive lesson learned.

[Thian]

13 minutes ago, Father Fintan Stack said:

The fact that the Thai military bought these devices, and at over-inflated prices, then continued to use them long after it was 'uncovered' that they were a scam, tells me all I need to know about this 'procurement'. 

 

These devices were sold as 'golf ball detectors' in small ads in British newspapers long before they were sold to the the World's stupidest or most corrupt armies.

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/fake-bomb-detectors-iraq

 

 

Well it's the same with the security-guards and their mirrors to look under your car before you can enter a mall. It's just about the scare-off effect.

 

There are no bins around the big malls since a long time and we all know why, some entrances (like central world coming from the square) have very high security right now..But if you go into Central Chidlom there's nobody at all at the securitycheck...it's all just for the idea. And it even works!

 

Same goes for the skytrain....purple line has 2 guards at the scanner.....the green line had an abandoned table last time i passed it.

 

 

[zig]

I wonder why the court case is only about eight devices. Some years ago it was reported that more than 1,500 of these devices were bought by Thai army over a number of years.

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

Just now, zig said:

I wonder why the court case is only about eight devices. Some years ago it was reported that more than 1,500 of these devices were bought by Thai army over a number of years.

 

If I recall correctly, various departments and entities in the Thai government bought them via different purchases at different points in time.

 

[Just Weird]

6 hours ago, JOC said:

And as usual.....No one is responsible.....

 

The manufacturer is!

[bluesofa]

19 minutes ago, cyberfarang said:

The advertisement also claimed the GT200 detector could detect ammunition, explosives, drugs, gold, ivory, currency and tobacco, even if the items were buried. But unfortunately for the Thai Armed forces Security Centre, the devices could not detect BS.

 

Once bitten twice shy, an expensive lesson learned.

They couldn't detect it because no one had specifically approved the purchase of a BS detector.

The one I have pat-pending on is a unit which works by detecting when a politician is speaking.

 

[khunPer]

Lots of stories available on the Internet about that fraud. A pair of wire-hangers could work just as well, and they often comes for free when a uniform is returned from the dry cleaner. Mind you that wire-hangers do a perfect job when searching for water – just like using a branch from a willow tree – or radiation from so-called "Curry" and "Hartmann" lines under the earth surface...

 

Edit: Link to article about Dowsing on Wikipedia.

Edited March 29, 2018 by khunPer

[bluesofa]

4 minutes ago, khunPer said:

Lots of stories available on the Internet about that fraud. A pair of wire-hangers could work just as well, and they often comes for free when a uniform is returned from the dry cleaner. Mind you that wire-hangers do a perfect job when searching for water – just like using a branch from a willow tree – or radiation from so-called "Curry" and "Hartmann" lines under the earth surface...

 

Edit: Link to article about Dowsing on Wikipedia.

I'd go for using something like that. Anything that can detect the nearest Indian restaurant must be good.

 

[Krataiboy]

I'm betting they couldn't understand the English in the accompanying literature.

[bluesofa]

6 minutes ago, Krataiboy said:

I'm betting they couldn't understand the English in the accompanying literature.

Perhaps there should have been more diagrams for the hard-of-learning.

 

[Arkady]

It must have been very obvious to the sellers and the purchasers than these were nothing but snake oil but a lot of people have got rich from them. Meanwhile, innocent people were arrested on explosives charges, while soldiers and others were blown up, as a result of the pieces of plastic letting real explosives go undetected. But money conquers all.

[Retiredandhappyhere]

On 29/03/2018 at 9:57 AM, jayboy said:

Let me make it simple for you.There is a world of difference between buying the products of a world class company like Toyota (where there is redress for mistakes) and a two bit scam merchant.Even in the case of the armed forces purchasing equipment from a reliable known source there is a duty for those in charge of procurement to undertake an intensive scrutiny to assure value for money and suitability of purpose.

 

None of the normal scrutiny took place in the case of the GT200 purchase.It is absurd to suggest that the blame should mainly be attributed to the crooked Taiwanese salesman (and equally absurd to suggest as you have that this might have been because the Thais could not read the manual).

 

The procurement committee completely failed in its duties.In the context of a culture where over invoicing (likely in this case), corruption, incompetence are common/endemic, particular care should have been taken to ensure transparency.It was not - and the slovenly, possible criminal results are there for all to see.

 

Needless to say there will be no accountability.There will be no proper investigation.Nobody will be punished.there will be no media outcry or credible journalistic investigation.The reaction from most astute Thais will be to presume there was some corruption but nothing too unusual.Let it pass.In China or Vietnam if an abuse had been found in the military the consequences might well have been  ....let's say "terminal".

 

And there will always be gullible innocents - the ubiquitous "useful idiots" - to defend the disgraceful episode and the army's role in it.

 

It is true that in the overall scheme of things this episode is small potatoes.But it's illustrative of the true horror of the system.

Have any checks been made on the new Chinese submarine?  What happens if it's equipment fails to work?  Who, if anyone, will be held responsible?  Will the manual be in Thai and/or Chinese?  

[bluesofa]

On 29/03/2018 at 2:19 PM, bluesofa said:

On 29/03/2018 at 2:12 PM, Krataiboy said:

I'm betting they couldn't understand the English in the accompanying literature.

Perhaps there should have been more diagrams for the hard-of-learning.

 

Further to my post above, here's an example: