British man gets 10 years in jail for selling fake bomb detectors
LONDON — A British judge on Thursday sentenced a businessman who sold fake bomb detectors to 10 years in jail, saying the millionaire had shown a cavalier disregard for potentially fatal consequences.
James McCormick made an estimated $77.8 million from the sales of his phony detectors — which were based on a novelty golf ball finder — to countries including Iraq, Belgium, Niger and Saudi Arabia.
McCormick, 57, was convicted of three counts of fraud last month and sentenced Thursday at the Old Bailey court in London, where Judge Richard Hone called his profits from a “callous confidence trick” obscene and outrageous.
“Your fraudulent conduct in selling so many useless devices for simply enormous profit promoted a false sense of security and in all probability materially contributed to causing death and injury to innocent individuals,” Hone told McCormick. “You have neither insight, shame or any sense of remorse.”
Prosecutor Richard Whittam said the devices, which sold for up to $42,000 each, claimed to be able to detect explosives and drugs under water and from the air. He said that in fact they “lacked any grounding in science” and were no better than trying to detect explosives at random.
McCormick, a former policeman and salesman, had told the court that he sold his detectors to police in Kenya, the prison service in Hong Kong, the army in Egypt and border control in Thailand.
“I never had any negative results from customers,” he said.
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