On Saturday, the Egyptian army unveiled a "miraculous" device it claims will detect and cure AIDS and Hepatitis. But the device, named C-Fast, looks eerily similar to a fake bomb detector sold by a British company to Iraq in the late 2000s.
That device, codenamed ADE 651, was later found to be a scam. One that reportedly cost the Iraqi government as much as $85 million dollars, and perhaps hundreds of lives. Its creator, James McCormick, was indicted and later sentenced to 10 years in prison.
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The possible link between the C-Fast and the fake bomb detector, named ADE 651, was first spotted by the Libyan Youth Movement, a citizen organization born after the Egyptian revolution of 2011. The group posted a picture of the two devices on Twitter.
#Egypt related: the army's #AIDs cure/detector is a fraud RT pic.twitter.com/f33yTiQ3yE
— LibyanYouthMovement (@ShababLibya) February 26, 2014
Dan Kaszeta, a former officer in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, and now a counter-terrorism consultant, said he believes the C-Fast is the same device, and expressed doubts as to its efficacy. Scientists have also met the Egyptian army's claims with skepticism.
"The scientific claims behind this are completely sh*t," he told Mashable. "The idea that somehow a virus has an electronic emanation that a device with no internal working parts and no power source can somehow pick up, it's patently ridiculous."
Both the C-Fast and the fake bomb detector sold to Iraq seem to be descendants of the infamous "Quadro Tracker," which was nothing more than a non-functional piece of plastic with a rotating antenna — basically a dowsing rod.
Between 1993 and 1996, the South Carolina Company Quadro Corp. sold the Quadro Tracker device to police departments and schools districts, claiming it could detect hidden drugs, explosives, weapons, and even lost golf balls. In 1996, however, the FBI found it to be a fraud and banned the sale of the device.
"The only thing this accurately detects is your checkbook," FBI agent Ronald W. Kelly said at the time, according to The New York Times.
Another similar explosive detector device called Sniffex was marketed in the mid 2000s. Unsurprisingly, the Navy later proved it was a scam.

A diagram of the C-Fast, taken from an alleged patent application for the device.
This is not the first time the C-Fast has gotten media attention though. The device has been already in use in Egypt since at least early 2013, according to The Guardian, which reported last year about a device that the Egyptian army claimed could cure Hepatitis C. The device was adapted from a bomb detector by Brigadier Ahmed Amien, an "engineer and bomb detection expert," according to British paper.
There's even a patent application, first reported by the BBC, that lists Amien as the alleged inventor of the C-Fast.
It's unclear whether the C-Fast is a copy of the ADE 651 or simply a repurposed bomb detector, though Kaszeta said the Egyptian government did buy these devices in the past. Moreover, as Kaszeta pointed out to us, the device can still be easily found for sale online: one listing sells it for $6,000.

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