British Millionaire Convicted For Selling Fake Bomb Detectors

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A 56-year-old British millionaire is facing jail after he was convicted on Tuesday of selling fake bomb detectors to Iraq and other countries.

James McCormick was found guilty of three counts of fraud at London’s Old Bailey court for selling completely ineffective devices based on an American novelty golf ball finder.

McCormick made an estimated £50 million(N12.1bn) from sales of his three models to Iraq, Belgium and the United Nations for use in Lebanon.

“The devices did not work and he knew they did not work,” prosecutor Richard Whittam told jurors.

Detectors aim to go nose to nose with sniffer dogs

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A sniffing dog at work.
| credits: google.com

At a binational armaments and security research centre in eastern France, Spitzer and his colleagues are working on a sensor to detect vapours of TNT and other explosives in very faint amounts, as might emanate from a bomb being smuggled through airport security. Using microscopic slivers of silicon covered with forests of even smaller tubes of titanium oxide, they aim to create a device that could supplement, perhaps even supplant, the best mobile bomb detector in the business: the sniffer dog.

But emulating the nose and brain of a trained dog is a formidable task. A bomb-sniffing device must be extremely sensitive, able to develop a signal from a relative handful of molecules. And it must be highly selective, able to distinguish an explosive from the “noise” of other compounds.

While researchers like Spitzer are making progress – and there are some vapor detectors on the market – when it comes to sensitivity and selectivity, dogs still reign supreme.

“Dogs are awesome,” said Aimee Rose, a product sales director at the sensor