Sayonara, Firepower!

It's been a while since I last wrote about the fine and upstanding fuel-additive company, Firepower.

We left them threatening my long-suffering blog hosts because I made available for download some promotional literature which Firepower's Australian CEO instructed me to make available for download. That, you may recall, was after he himself had decided not to sue me after all.

That second threat - from some Firepower representative who still hasn't had the courage to actually contact me - didn't work out too well for them, as anybody who's spent a minute or two on teh intarwebs could have predicted.

But I'm sure Firepower have worse things to worry about now. Because, amazingly enough for a company whose fuel-saving products would obviously be worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year if the claims made for them were true, Firepower now appear to be on the verge of collapse.

Offices abandoned, boss-man uncontactable, angry creditors (including the basketball team Firepower so famously bought) trying to get their money... it's a sad, sad scene, which observers of the burgeoning magic-fuel-pill industry haven't witnessed since, oh, the last magic-fuel-pill company came along.

(The Firepower debacle has been very bad for the entire Australian National Basketball League. Not only did they buy one of the front-running teams and then just kind of... not pay anybody, but they apparently got one of their mates into an advisory position for the whole League.)

Oh, yeah - remember those financially brilliant sportsmen who so eagerly invested in Firepower? On account of how they saw a video in which some chimneys were producing black smoke, and then it turned white, and if that isn't hard scientific evidence then I don't know what is?

Bad news for them too, I'm afraid.

Yes, I'm a bit gloat-y about all this. But overall I'm just... tired.

Over and over and over, this shit happens. Some bloke in a thousand-dollar suit turns up with a PowerPoint presentation and some dodgy supporting documentation from conveniently far-away nations, claiming to have a magic substance that causes internal combustion engines to do thermodynamically implausible things. If he's telling the truth then he'll be the richest man in history by a couple of orders of magnitude... and yet, instead of making his case to General Motors or Exxon, here he is in a rented serviced office, selling shares for cash.

And people hurl money at him, completely ignoring the fact that the same damn scam has been run hundreds of times before. Heck, they don't even care if the same guy has run the scam before.

And there's much excitement and news reports and press conferences, and extravagant displays of wealth and power (it's fine to spend millions on a basketball team; oddly enough, though, they never remember to spend a few grand on a proper test of their claims...), and anybody who dares point out that it's all obvious bullshit gets threatened with legal action.

And then... they take the money and run.

Again.

(Find all of my Firepower posts here.)

10 Responses to “Sayonara, Firepower!”

  1. Mohonri Says:

    Good riddance. Unfortunately, the demise of the company will most likely not serve as a deterrent to the myriad other people who are going to pull the same stunts and run away with similar amounts of money from gullible people.

    Now that we're done with this particular saga, when do we get to see more gadget reviews?

  2. Changes Says:

    In the beginning you start by feeling mad about the companies who so blatantly exploit the naive.
    Then you start thinking "hey, just how many dumb people who fall for this there are?"
    Then your respect for most of humanity starts going negative.
    Then you start wondering why the ones taking money out of dumb people are others and not you.

    Luckily, the fear of being caught and thrown in the slammer (along with a few scraps of what morals I have) prevent me from jumping on the scam-the-idiot bandwagon, but I can't help but feel a certain degree of envy for those who do.

  3. chiefnewo Says:

    Unfortunately the ones "born every minute" hang around afterwards, so their numbers just tend to grow.

  4. tantryl Says:

    Ah, Firepower.

    What a company.

    I say buy shares now while investor confidence is low! It can only go up from here!

    Since they're not on any stock exchange, anyone got the number of a Kings player?

  5. pompomtom Says:

    The google ads this article is encouraging are brilliant.

    http://www.RunCarOnWaterGuide.com anyone?

  6. Bern Says:

    chiefnewo - the real problem isn't that the ones "born every minute" hang around afterwards - it's that they breed afterwards...

    Thus the population of fools experiences a net positive growth. And as such people are easily swayed into having more offspring by the promise of a wad of cash (that can be easily converted into a new plasma TV or that really cool VP commodore down the street), then they tend to breed faster than those with sense.

    The politicians love it of course - in fact, they're running much the same game as the firepower people, when you think about it - fooling people into investing in you for imaginary gains... :-)

  7. J-H Says:

    Why do they get money from the federal government??!!
    Can this be seen as misappropriation of funds? Shouldn't somebody get sued for screwing over the taxpayers?

  8. anonick Says:

    I met Tim a number of times a few years ago through my work. We tried hard to get the Firepower business in order, however he just continually stuffed us around. In the end, we figured if he was going to stuff his advisers around this much, something was amiss. He was always so non-committal. Over the past few years I have written off debts all over Perth owing by Tim and Firepower. I have come to understand that if they owe the debt, it likely will not be paid. It is amazing the debts this company has quickly racked up. I wish I could tell you the places they have been owing money to, but confidentiality says I can not.

  9. reyalp Says:

    I am shocked. Shocked I tell you! They must have gone underground because big oil put a hit out on them (probably with this guy), right ?!?

  10. Zarquon Says:

    They just need to talk to the Vortex Fluid Optimizer Corp http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2008/06/ah_the_credulity.php


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