Glamourising scams is not something we like doing at Stuff. Thousands of well-meaning yet gullible people are duped by scam artists every year and while one would like to think that the majority of our society has grown wise to the more common scams, certain conspiracy nuts just make for such easy targets. Those folks that adamantly believe 5G technology is the cause of the coronavirus have become so paranoid over an issue that never existed in the first place, it almost feels like they’re inviting cunning criminals to take advantage of them. Such is the case with this “Anti-5G device” being sold for £340 (R7,400) which, quite obviously, turned out to be a hoax.
Named the 5GBioShield, which sounds like some fake piece of equipment ripped straight out of Star Trek parody you’d see on some kind of crime procedural dedicating an episode to mocking nerd culture, the little electronic stick was said to protect the user against harmful 5G waves. Using ” a uniquely applied process of quantum nano-layer technology, to balance the imbalanced electric oscillations arising from all electric fog induced by all devices such as: laptops, cordless phones, wlan, tablet, (the device) brings balance into the field at the atomic and cellular level restoring balanced effects to all harmful (ionized and non-ionized) radiation,” writes the manufacturer on the product’s website. You don’t even need to plug it in…which means that magic must also be involved! How exciting!
As you can probably surmise from such a stupid description, the 5GBioShield is complete garbage. An investigation mounted by the BBC through security company Pen Test Partners revealed the device to be nothing more than a 128MB memory stick, valued at £5 or roughly R107,24 at the time of writing. Cheap skates didn’t even go all the way to sell 1GB sticks, the absolute cheek.
Writing about their discovery, Pen Test Partners said, “the 5G BioShield is nothing more than a £5 USB key with a sticker on it…Whether or not the sticker provides £300 worth of quantum holographic catalyzer technology we’ll leave you to decide.” That’s the kind of sarcasm we appreciate around here.
While we’re not exactly promoting scam artistry, it is admittedly funny watching someone either take advantage of conspiracy theory nuts or one such conspiracy theory nut attempt to pass off complete nonsense as fact. Whatever the case may be, it bears repeating that 5G technology is not causing COVID-19.
(Source: Ars Technica)