This is absolutely disgusting. Guy has only received a 3 year jail sentence, he should have been given life, his wife given 300hrs community service.
A man who claimed plastic devices he made in his garden shed could detect bombs and find missing Madeleine McCann has been jailed.
Samuel Tree, 68, was sentenced to three and a half years while his wife Joan, 62, received 300 hours community work.
Their plastic Alpha 6 cost just a few pounds but sold for thousands.
The couple are the last of a group of fraudsters - who marketed their devices to governments and conflict zones around the world - to be jailed.
The Trees were found guilty at the Old Bailey in August of making an article for use in a fraud between January 2007 and July 2012.
Sentencing them at London’s Kingston Crown Court on Friday, judge Richard Marks QC described the scam as “a bizarre and fantastic proposition as to be almost akin to something out of Alice in Wonderland”.
Police said they were driven by “personal greed” and were part of a criminal network worth £80m.
Background info
A Somerset-based businessman has been convicted of three counts of fraud over the sale of bogus bomb detectors after his operation was exposed in a BBC Newsnight investigation in 2010.
This was a scam of global dimensions. James McCormick marketed his fake bomb detectors around the world, selling them in Georgia, Romania, Niger, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and beyond.
But his main market was Iraq, where lives depended on bomb detection and where the bogus devices were, and still are, used at virtually every checkpoint in the capital.
Between 2008 and 2009 alone, more than 1,000 Iraqis were killed in explosions in Baghdad. Thousands more were injured, including 21-year-old Haneen Alwan, who was two months pregnant and had gone out to buy ice cream when she was caught in a bomb in January 2009.
“My life was completely destroyed, everything gone in an instant,” she said. “I lost the baby and my husband divorced me.”
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/67090000/jpg/_67090088_fake_bomb_detector624.jpg
read full article here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22204076
NewsNight investigation from 2010
More on the BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29446939
This news is as old as the chicks I date man common
Common man, it even say 23 April 2013 on the top of the article
I linked that article so there was some background information, I should have linked the article about him being sentenced today. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29477894
3 and a half years is a legit jail sentence for this guy, the people who bough the detectors didnt bother to ask for samples to test them properly so fuck em and under the proceeds of crime act, this old dude is now broke anyway.
Light sentence on that serious a crime means they ratted on their partners.
Ahhh, this does make sense.
