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 fakecheque 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 Heraldpublished 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?
(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.
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, orwhatever. 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.
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 testimonialevidence, uncontrolleduser 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.
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.)
"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.)
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.
I replaced the surrounds on my Logitech Z-5500s with these, thinking they would do music better, and actually I am really quite impressed!
$120 for five speakers, including "full range" (almost) tower speakers!
Anyway, there is tons of cheap gear on eBay, all under "Dream Acoustics". I would love to see you write up your opinion on it, as I know audio is one of your specialities.
Stephan
Well, this is a weird situation. It's sort of like finding someone pulling the Violin Scam, except they're not claiming the fiddle's worth more than $5.
I don't think it's at all likely that "Dream Acoustics", or the other companies whose products are functionally indistinguishable from the Dream ones, would ever send me anything for review. There's a whole gaggle of them - "Pure Audio", "Omni Audio", "Dynalab", and the list goes on. Collectively, they're often known as "white-van speakers", because classically they're sold, at inflated prices, by scam artists in vans, to whoever they can flag down.
The Wikipedia article currently has a lengthy list of white-van speaker brands, as do other sources. Many white-van brand names are deliberately similar to the names of companies that make high-quality loudspeakers. Again, Dream Acoustics seem to be taking the high road here; they're not trying to sell speakers labelled "DunAudio" or "BJL" or "Woofdale" or "FEK" or some other brand you'd expect to see on a set of speakers in Grand Theft Auto.
The one unifying characteristic of all of these odd-branded speakers, of course, is that they are not actually very good. They're usually pretty nice-looking, but that's the most complimentary thing you can say about them.
If "Dream Hi-Fi" were to send me some of their speakers to review, I'd take them apart, photograph the humiliatingly small magnets on the backs of the drivers and the lightweight, under-bracedenclosures (which may not have anydamping material in them, not even a token handful of cotton waste...), and observe that speakers just like these have been made available to the public by blokesinwhite vans for many years now.
I've been hunting for people who've actually done acoustic and electrical measurements on these sorts of speakers, or better yet torn one down and looked inside, but unfortunately there's a pretty small intersection between the set of people who buy white-van speakers, and the set of people who know how to test speakers. A hi-fi outfit called GR Research, however, has looked at a few of them - but none of the articles are still on the GR Research site for some reason, so I had to dig them up from elsewhere, like archive.org.
Here's GR Research's piece about some "Dahlton" white-van specials, which the tester says have "the worst response curve I have ever measured on any speaker".
(Including, by the way, these "Digital Audio Titan Line Hammerhead Eagle iThrust 3810SL" white-van speakers he wrote a short piece about earlier. At the time, they had the worst response curve he'd ever seen. Another reviewer has suggested that one should expect these speakers to sound like a crate of donkeys falling down a staircase.)
The Dahlton speakers can, at least, manage the usual department-store-speaker big muddy 60Hz bass boom, provided you make sure to aim their side-firing bass drivers at a wall at the correct angle. (Bass response below the 60Hz resonance peak is pretty much zero.)
And yes, he opened the box, and found thin wood, no bracing, and no damping material. And a really cheap crossover - but at least there was a crossover, which is apparently not something you can necessarily count on in this sector of the market.
(Without a crossover, woofers will be trying to reproduce treble and overheating, tweeters will be trying to reproduce bass and distorting, and midranges will have both problems at once. Turn the volume well up and you will damage each driver in turn, starting with the tweeter.)
Oh, and apparently the Dahlton manual gives advice about bi-amping the speakers, but the speakers' apparently-electrically-separate terminals on the back panel are actually connected together inside the box. So anybody who actually tries bi-amping will probably blow up at least one amplifier!
There's also this piece (for some reason archived on someone's Comcast home page) about some "VMPS 626R" speakers, which are the worst speakers the GR Research guy has ever looked at that didn't (in this one case, at least) come from blokes in a van. Again, they've got lightweight cabinets with no bracing, but there is at least a tiny useless puff of damping material! The VMPS speakers also feature drivers that don't fit properly in the holes in the box, atrocious crossover design with slightly different components in each speaker, large changes in frequency response from small changes in listener position, and overall assembly quality that suggests that the people who put the speakers together were forced to do so in some sort of reeducation camp.
The difference between you, Stephan, and almost everybody else in the world who has bought speakers like this, is that you have not been ripped off. As you say, $AU120 (less than $US110, as of late July 2010) for five speakers is not a bad deal, even if the speakers aren't very good. As long as they don't have any of the special driver-popping, amp-killing features of the very worst of the white-van crowd - which even cheap eBay speakers really shouldn't have - you'll be fine.
I think this is a good opportunity for a further digression about the white-van scam. It's perpetrated every day in most, if not all, affluent nations, and it always works the same way.
There is, you see, a company that imports these could-be-mistaken-for-expensive speakers in great numbers for ridiculously low unit prices. The company does not sell the speakers directly. It instead - on paper, at least - sells them on consignment to a bunch of "independent contractors", who're the guys in the, usually white, vans. Those contractors then head out and look for suckers, spinning a story to explain why these super-expensive very nice speakers are so very cheap, today only, bargain of a lifetime, et cetera.
Perhaps they just fitted out a hotel or something and have one set of speakers left over, officially these lovely speakers are already installed along with all the others, the hotel's loss could be your gain, and so on. Or maybe these speakers, um, fell off the back of a truck into our van, mate, nudgenudge. There's almost always some sort of underhanded flavour to the story, as is the case with so many scams. One of the best ways to get money out of a mark is to make him think there sure is a scam going on, but he and the scam artists are in it together, ripping off someone else.
(People often expand this into the maxim "you can't scam an honest man", but that's rubbish. Of course you can scam an honest man. You just can't scam him with a technique like "would you like to buy this property which I strongly imply is not actually mine to sell?")
Officially, the speaker importers never tell the "speakermen" to do anything underhanded at all. They're just drivin' around askin' people if they'd like to pay $800, which is half the retail price, buddy, for sets of flimsy speakers that wholesale for fifty bucks.
Actually, the sky's the limit for the alleged "retail price" of these things. In the case of these examples....
...it's $3,659!
If you start haggling, the speakermen know they've got you. They can turn a profit from almost any final sale price, no matter how broken the mark believes the speakermens' balls have become. The only thing the speakermen have to do is remember to keep a straight face when they allow you to pay a mere $250 for those $50 speakers.
What usually seems to actually happen in the world of the speakermen is that the importers and the van men all get together at the beginning and end of each day and have themselves one of those SELL SELL SELLHAHA WE ARE THE MODERN HIGHWAYMEN STAND AND DELIVER scam-artist Come-To-Satan revival meetings.
Well, that's what I think you'd probably see if you hid a spy camera in the distribution warehouse (here's an actual hidden-camera exposé!). But if anybody ends up in court, it'll transpire that the distributors actually can't even clearly recall the speakermen's names, much less any information about what those crazy kids might have gotten up to.
The only speaker-scam van I can remember personally seeing was actually green, not white. White vans are apparently much more common than coloured ones, though, I presume because legit small commercialvehicles are so often white. Some white-vanners even go to the trouble of getting their dodgy speaker brand of choice painted on the side of the van - or, at least, printed on a big magnetic sign.
(I've probably actually seen many speaker-scam vans over the years, without knowing what they were. Only if the speakermen go for the time-honoured "shout at potential marks while you're all stopped at the lights" fishing techniques can you identify them in traffic.)
I think some really slippery crap-speaker manufacturers even made a few "genuine" speakers, which they sent to reviewers or put on display in a showroom... and then went into bulk production with their standard awful speakers, that resemble the good ones. I don't know whether any manufacturers are bothering with that now, though.
Getting back to the eBay speakers: The crucial difference between a $AU199-plus-delivery Dream Acoustics five-speaker set (the Buy It Now price seems to have gone up since Stephan bought his speakers), and their white-van brethren, is that the eBay sellers seem to be asking a quite fair price. The specifications are all outrageous fantasy, of course, but that's nothing new in the low-end audio market, and I think factory quality control is now good enough that the speakers do usually work, for suitably small values of "work".
(The current $AU199 Dream Acoustic 5-speaker sets claim a total power handling for the five speakers of nine hundred and fifty watts. Expect the voice coils to actually be slapping the end stops at maybe a twentieth of that power, not that this actually matters for even quite loud normal listening. The specs also shamelessly claim the main speakers have response from "35 - 22,000Hz". This is more bullshit, but it's the same bullshit you'll find on the spec-sheets for countless big-brand department-store speakers and amplifiers. My favourite example of this nonsense is the decorative response graphs printed on those plastic speaker-surround doodads for mounting six-by-nines on your sedan's parcel shelf.)
Shipping for a five-speaker set makes the bargain a bit less impressive. Melbourne metro delivery from "Dream Hi-Fi" is only $AU39 for a five-speaker set, but shipping to most other Australian capitals costs $AU79, and if you're out in the sticks a bit like me here in Katoomba, you're looking at $AU158. That's not a secret, though; just plug your postcode into the shipping calculator on their eBay listings.
UPDATE: The above eBay store no longer exists, as of late 2012. "MyDepot Online" has Dream Acoustics speakers now; there are also several people selling used sets.
(When I did a "completed listings" search on ebay.com.au, I turned up numerous five-speaker Dream Acoustics surround systems that've auctioned for little more than $AU100. That low-low-low sale price can be considerably pumped up by shipping charges, but if the all-told price works out at less than $AU40 per speaker, it's difficult to complain.)
I think I should also mention that you don't have to troll the lowest-priced eBay dealers or wait for some guy in a van to yell at you if you want to buy some crappy speakers. I mean, look at these preposterous Kenwoods from a few years ago. They may sound better than white-van speakers, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Companies that're famous for making speakers, and nothing else, seldom sell crap like this. Even Cerwin-Vega's world-renowned Speakers For Drunk University Students are way, way better than true department-store crap. If the brand of your speakers can also be seen on televisions, microwave ovens and jaffle irons, though, watch out.
Oh, and as a general rule, the more closely the front panel of a one-box "mini hi-fi system" resembles the cockpit of one of those tanks from Tron, the more dire will be the quality of the actual sound, which is largely limited by the quality of the speakers. (You can substantially upgrade cheap mini-systems by hooking up just about any old pair of full-sized garage-sale speakers in place of the standard ones.) It's perfectly possible to buy one-box "hi-fi" systems that really do have quite high fidelity in the first place, though. Look for wooden speaker cabinets, and minimal dekotora-ism.
Getting back, finally, to Dream Acoustics, their US site links to Dway Corporation, their distributor here in Australia. Curiously, though, the multi-speaker sets listed on the Dway site are all much more expensive than the eBay speakers. Different models seem to come and go rather frequently; at the moment 5-speaker sets start at $AU499, and you can pay as much as $AU1299 for the fanciest set. Plus delivery, which can easily add more than $100 extra, as I found after doing the old pretend-you're-buying-something dance to get the site to tell me what shipping would cost.
(The US site has prettier pictures, but no prices. If everything there had a price north of $1000, then it'd look exactly the same as the Web sites set up to fool people into thinking that various kinds of white-van speakers are actually high-end gear. Note, just to be clear, that I am specifically not suggesting that Dream Acoustics are actually associated with the white-van scam. UPDATE: As of late 2012, both dreamacoustics.com and dway.com.au are dead, which is exactly the sort of thing that periodically happens when white-van scammers start attracting regulatory attention and submerge to change names. Not, once again, that I'm alleging that that is what's happened here. Not at all. Not even a little bit.)
Dream Acoustics aren't the only purveyors of suspiciously marvellously inexpensive loudspeakers on ebay.com and ebay.com.au, of course. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you can, by now, buy on eBay products from every Chinese factory that also supplies speakermen. It just took a while for someone to realise that all but the very worst white-van speakers actually are a product that can be honestly sold.
But white-van speakers - the less-awful ones, anyway - aren't. EBay's low overheads probably do make it possible to make an honest living out of selling these things.
(There are also always a lot of white-van speakers being sold used on eBay. If you can get a pair for $10 from someone near enough that you can go and pick them up yourself, it can be a decent deal. Otherwise, avoid anything that gets lots of hits when you search for "[brand name] white van".)
There is, let me be clear, a very large and very audible difference between the sound quality of even the very finest white-van loudspeaker and that of any "proper" speaker, of the sort that an actual hi-fi store would not be embarrassed to sell. (Or, for that matter, of the sort that you canbuildfromakit!)
But many white-van buyers are quite happy with their speakers, especially if said buyer is still wrapped up in a warm and fuzzy psychoacousticblanket because they think they've gotten a huge bargain.
If you don't get slugged too hard for delivery, it becomes arguable that you can't go wrong in buying these sorts of speakers on eBay, provided you don't actually want particularly high fidelity. Here, for instance, is a page about Dream and some similarly-unnervingly-cheap eBay speakers, which do seem to be perfectly OK for the - very small amount of - money.
I, personally, would much rather get my movie audio through two good small speakers than through five lousy big ones. The Loudspeaker Kit's venerable build-'em-yourself M4 mini monitors, for instance, can now be had for $AU258 the pair, including delivery.
But I haven't actually listened to any of the eBay cheapies. If anybody reading this has, I invite you to tell us all what you think of them in the comments.
I'd especially like to hear from any readers who have in fact bought speakers from a couple of blokes in a van.
Yep, this dude's running an advance-fee scam. If I send him $US200, he'll allow me to "collect [my] money". Except, of course, there is no actual money. There never is.
What I particularly like about this version of the scam is its pared-down, minimalist nature. "Matt Arcay" never sent me an e-mail, or anything. Just this money request. I have received not the slightest hint of the amount or source of the promised "your money" - just this ridiculous "if you want to collect your money simply agree to this and send the money, so you can receive your money".
(I don't know where scammers learn that odd repetitive grammar that repeats because it is repetitive grammar and redundant and says the same thing over and over. I've received similar messages from different putative locations, like this guy allegedly from Puerto, I'm sorry, I mean PUERTO RICO.)
Perhaps Mr "Arcay" did e-mail me separately, of course, but that message was spam-filtered, so all I received was the accompanying money-request e-mail from PayPal.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is the only way "Arcay" contacts prospective marks, though. If they reply asking what the deal is then he knows he's got a live one.
What he really hopes for, though, is a mark who just sends him the $200 immediately. That's probably because they reckon "Arcay" meant to send a ton of money to some other person but has accidentally picked the mark instead. So the mark wants to cash in before "Arcay" discovers his mistake.
In that case, "Arcay" has basically won the lottery. A cow like that probably has a lot more milk to give.
I don't know whether it's possible for a scammer in one of the classic famous-only-for-scams countries, like Nigeria or some other TPLAC, to open a PayPal account. This scammer could actually be in the USA - or "Arcay" could be a money-mule front man for a scammer in some other nation.
(There may be some way to report this blatant fraud to PayPal. I'm not eager to waste another morning trying to figure out how, though.)
Even if it's tricky for people in developing nations to run a scam like this, there's a huge incentive to do so. In urban Nigeria, many people don't even make 60,000 nairaper annum, which as I write this is onlyabout $US400. A Nigerian who makes $US1200 a year is doing pretty well, so it's hardly surprising that there's so much enthusiasm about chopping that much and more out of some dumb Westerner's giant wallet.
(The BBC's recent three-part documentary "Welcome to Lagos" is, by the way, excellent.)
Can you do some research on this amazing device, which claims to be a superconductor. Is it for real? If so it is the most advanced scientific device on the market.
They go on to talk about "rotating electromagnetic waves" being converted to and from "far infrared", and the "crystal structure" of the wire. This is all far too advanced for little old me.
OK, yes, superconductivity would save power, if you replaced all of the transmission wires with superconductors (as is, very occasionally, actually done). But whatever Keseco say they're doing, that isn't it. Their gadget connects in parallel with your existing wiring.
(Even if you could magically turn all of the conductors in your home into superconductors, while simultaneously sprinkling everything with the pixie dust it'd need in order to still work with zero conductor resistance, you'd save only a tiny amount. Where electricity is lost as heat in the home, it's almost all meant to be lost as heat, either directly as in a toaster, or indirectly in the course of causing some motor, CPU or loudspeaker to work.)
Oh, and no superconductor yet discovered operates at a temperature above -138 degrees Celsius.
But I'm sure these minor quibbles are all thoroughly dealt with somewhere in Keseco's complicated explanations.
The Keseco devices may have an unusual theory of operation - whatever it is - but in appearance and installation they're pretty standard magic energy savers. You just connect the Keseco device in parallel with your existing wiring in the breaker box, and that's it. Whatever it does, it does it to any combination of devices inside the building, without necessarily even being in there itself, much less being electrically coupled or configured to them in any readily apparent way.
Never mind that, though; you can't argue with success. And Keseco's devices are very successful. Just ask them!
Don't ask anyone actually in the electrical-device-analysis business, though. As is usually the case with these sorts of devices, Keseco does not appear to be in any hurry to do any independent tests of their power-saving claims. Neither are these Enerwise people here in Australia, as far as I can see. The Enerwise site uses terms like "proven" and "the results are in!", but the actual evidence is just the usual wall of testimonials. (I eagerly await the publication of Enerwise's "Big Book Of Brag"! Surely that will be where we'll find the long-awaited independent controlled tests!)
But wait - Keseco's "Certificate" section has an actual "Test Report"! It's reproduced so small as to be almost illegible, but I managed to decipher it!
It's a RoHS test, that certifies that the Keseco products pass poisonous-chemicals tests. Not that they work.
And then, also in the Certificate section, there's some more paperwork, but in Korean.
(This also seems to be par for the course in the miracle-energy-product world. If there are tests, they'll often be from labs in far-flung parts of the world where they don't speak English, even though they're being used to support claims made for products that're sold in English-speaking countries. Even energy-saver companies that are based in English-speaking countries sometimes, somehow, manage to do this.)
For the squinting-and-translating-Korean convenience of my readers, here are direct links to the largest images available from the Keseco "Test Report" page:
In among the Hangul there's what that looks like a statement that... something... used two-point-something per cent less power after... something else happened. But I'm not sure.
None of it seems in any way connected to Keseco's "guarantee" of a 5% power saving.
The "Performance Report" on keseco.com makes bolder claims, and is another entirely typical document for this sort of outfit. Bare numbers, no info on how the test was controlled, and further silence on the all-important question of whether the tester was on the Keseco payroll or not.
This sort of proof-by-assertion is standard for makers of energy savers, magical mileage-improving fueladditives, magnetic anti-arthritis bracelets, ultrasonic pest repellers, literally-magic "money magnets" and so on. There are hundreds - heck, probably thousands - of companies of this sort, big and professional enough to put together a sales package like Keseco's. But even when these companies manage to get large amounts of money from cannyinvestors, they never, ever do the proper tests that would let them actually prove their claims and take the giant step up to theirrightfulplacehigh up the Fortune 500 list. Instead, they sell (or attempt to sell) their products one at a time, direct to consumers whose own standards of evidence are satisfied by the testimonials presented.
(Often, there's a hybrid middle level between the company-that-should-do-some-proper-tests and the gullible consumers. That level is occupied by the gullible distributor, who liked the product so much he bought a franchise, but who has not yet realised that there's no good reason to suppose the product really does work.)
Keseco's PDF catalogue, and their "Products info" page, also cheerfully claim "Preventing Harmful Electromagnetic Waves" as a feature of their system. I suppose that means your microwave stops working, too. If mobile phones, by some freakchance, do turn out to be bad for you, I suppose your Keseco box will also suck up all of their emissions.
The site and catalogue also say the Keseco boxes "prevent" static electricity. Somehow. Somewhere. And then the catalogue has a picture of what looks like a molecular model of DNA, and then something about Fermi energy. I'd have been completely convinced if only they'd worked in Bose-Einstein condensates and particles with imaginary mass.
The Keseco catalogue also has a number of examples of another standard marker for this sort of business, Irrelevant Certifications Offered As If They Have Something To Do With Whether The Product Works.
There's a Koreanpatent! A registered design! A trademark! A corporate insurance policy of some sort! Alleged CMA, CE, ANCE, ISO 9001 and RoHSconformance! None of which means the product bloody works!
(Just to make this clear one more time, because it comes up so very, very, VERY often: The Patent Offices in various countries make no attempt whatsoever to determine whether an idea presented for patenting is actually good for anything at all. You don't even have to provide a working model. There's usually some basic screening to keep out blatant perpetual-motion devices {possibly with a caveat that you can patent such a device, but only if you do bring a working model!}, but that's all. All the patent office cares about is whether the idea is sufficiently different from other things that already exist to be worthy of a patent - and most patent offices are so overworked these days that they don't even do this very well. So despite what thousands of crackpots and swindlers have claimed over lo, these many, many years, there is no connection whatsoever between patentability and functionality.)
I remind you, gentle reader, that all of the wonderful effects Keseco products are supposed to cause are, somehow, created by a box that you just stick in or near the building's breaker box, and wire in parallel with the building's circuits. Whatever those circuits are, and whatever business you're in. It would be entirely churlish to suggest that this is analogous to making a "water saver" that hangs off a T-fitting next to your water meter, thereby impeding or encouraging the water's flow in no way at all. So I won't do that.
I suggest, Andrew, that you just put up with your present electricity bill for another year. By then, either Keseco will be a household name, one of the most profitable corporations in the world, with Nobel Prizes in the pipeline for their engineers... or they'll still be grubbing around with all the other retail sellers of worthless "power saving" talismans.
But oh, dear - the proudly-displayed accreditations in Keseco's catalogue go all the way back to 2004! The site itself has been around since 2002!
And yet still, no Keseco boxes in every electrical substation. No Keseco boxes the size of Winnebagos hanging off the side of every aluminium smelter. No Nobel Prizes.
I needed six rechargeable AA cells for an old Hanimex potato-masher flash, which I bought cheap the other day to do some Strobist experimenting. I've only been buying low self-discharge ("LSD"!) NiMH cells for a while now, but I don't have six identical AA LSD cells spare at the moment, and I didn't want to drop the substantial extra amount of money to buy six more LSD cells for a flash that I'm not necessarily even going to use much.
So I hit eBay, looking for the finest, cheapest NiMH AAs in the world. And I won an auction for twelve allegedly-2500mAh "BTY"-branded NiMH AAs, for 5.5 UK pounds (about $US8.30 or $AU9.30, as I write this).
That one on the right didn't explode; I ripped it apart to see what, if anything, was inside. 'Cos it sure wasn't a 2500mAh NiMH cell.
I didn't, to be fair, actually expect these AAs to really have a capacity of 2500 milliamp-hours. Capacity inflation is rampant in the rechargeable-battery market. Even the big brands often seem to pump up the capacity numbers a bit, and it's perfectly normal for an off-brand "2500mAh" cell to have a real capacity of only 1500mAh or so.
That was fine with me, though, especially for less than ten bucks delivered.
(I think you even get the "off-brand PC power supply" situation, in which some dealers sell a range of cells specified from 2000mAh all the way to a truly audacious 3000mAh, but all of them actually have the same 1500mAh-ish cells inside the wrapper. DealExtreme, for instance, sell "2000mAh", "2300mAh", "2500mAh", "2800mAh" and, yes, "3000mAh" "Maxuss"-branded AAs, with the allegedly-higher-capacity ones priced accordingly. The user reviews suggest to me that you might as well just buy the cheapest ones. If there's a difference besides price and the printing on the label, it doesn't appear to be a large one.)
These BTY cells were much worse than I expected, though. I knew something was up as soon as I opened the package; the BTY cells are way too light. They weigh about 18 grams each, versus 29 grams for an old Sanyo 2500mAh cell, and 30 grams for a Sanyo Eneloop LSD AA. They're substantially lighter than the old worn-out 1650mAh off-brand cells still mouldering in the bottom of my Battery Drawer.
My Maha C-808M charger (yours, Australian shoppers, for $AU183.15 delivered from Servaas Products) didn't like the look of the BTYs, either. It did charge them, but flashed its "battery fault" error at the end, possibly because the charge cycle was over so quickly.
To their credit, the BTYs did run my flash. But not for very long. When I charged them again and hooked one up to a 0.9-ohm resistance (a horrifying load for an alkaline cell, no big deal for a rechargeable), I got a useful run time...
...of about 25 minutes, for a total capacity of maybe 350 milliamp-hours, with a following wind. (The terminal voltage also dropped to less than 0.8V immediately, even into this modest-for-a-NiMH-cell load.)
It was at this point that I disembowelled one of the BTYs. I was half-expecting to find a fractional-AA or AAA, or something, in there, but the casing was actually full of the normal Swiss-roll sandwich of metallic electrode and noxious-electrolyte-soaked separator. I'm not sure whether the BTYs are actually nickel-metal-hydride or mere nickel-cadmium cells; I don't think you can really tell just by looking. They certainly only have the capacity of the ultra-cheap NiCds you get in bargain-store solar garden lights, though.
(There are honest dealers that sell these sorts of cells, by the way. Here's an eBay search that finds one current dealer's particular description of them. I have no experience of that particular dealer, but they'd have to be pretty perverse to misdescribe low-capacity NiCds. Note that you still don't necessarily want these cells, even if you only need low capacity, because NiCds contain highly poisonous cadmium, and remain a serious disposal problem.)
Aaaanyway, I filed a PayPal dispute over this, and anticipated a long and painful experience. So when I got an e-mail from PayPal the next day saying the dispute had been closed, I of course assumed that someone at eBay had decided I was ineligible for a refund because it had been three months since the dispute was filed on the 35th of Octember and I still hadn't had the batteries X-rayed by a fully licensed Federal Hat Inspector while I whistled Dixie and a five-legged elephant painted my naked body with the full ceremonial vestments of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.
But the dispute was actually closed because the seller had instantly knuckled under, and given me a full refund.
If there's one thing I've learned from reading The Consumerist, it's that whenever you complain about some crazy fee and they instantly reduce or waive it, you're always looking at a scam. (Well, almost always.)
And lo, searching for other people's experiences of "BTY" batteries turned up a number of reports astonishingly similar to, though blessedly less long-winded than, my own.
This guy tested a range of cells and found BTYs ranked equal worst. There are people complainingabout them on DealExtreme (or, at least, giving them one-star ratings). Heck, there's even a Guide post on eBay itself that warns about them.
So, on balance, I'm not sure that I actually deserved to get my money back.
There are plenty of eBay dealers, including the one I bought from, who are still selling "BTY" cells. Some of them have taken the advanced camouflage measure of calling the cells "BT" instead of "BTY", but my advanced h4XX0ring skillz can still find them.)
Don't buy those batteries.
Oh, and how did I solve my flash-powering problem? Well, the awful BTY batteries do actually power it for a little while; for longer run time, I just yanked the six-cell NiCd pack from a giant robot bug I'm not currently using and hacked up a lead to connect it to the flash's external-power-input pins.
So now I can make a camera rig that looks even stupider than this!
