BEAUMONT, Texas (Jan 24, 1996 8:03 p.m. EST) -- Schools, consumers and law enforcement agencies wasted more than $1 million on worthless devices marketed as able to detect hidden drugs or explosives, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
They said Quadro Corp. of Harleyville, S.C., has been barred temporarily from making, selling or distributing its Positive Molecular Locator, also known as a Quadro Tracker.
Company officials were ordered to appear in federal court next week to determine if the order should be made permanent. A criminal investigation of the company also was underway.
The black plastic box and its accessories, which together cost from $395 to $8,000, were fraudulently claimed to be able to safeguard property or livestock or even find missing golf balls, authorities said.
Brochures falsely claimed endorsement by federal law enforcement agencies and said the device could detect drugs "on or in a person, or even in the bloodstream."
"The only thing this accurately detects is your checkbook," said FBI agent Ronald W. Kelly.
"How would you like to have it pointed at your kids, to have them branded as having drugs ... when it is patently false?" Kelly said.
About 1,000 of the devices are known to have been sold for a total of more than $1 million, said Mike Bradford, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.
"We're concerned use of this device could result in compromising criminal investigations," Bradford said. "We are concerned that a number of agencies have spent substantial amounts of money buying these products. There is no scientific basis for this device to work."
"Our lawyer won't let us talk," Wade Quattlebaum, president of Quadro Corp., said Wednesday.
The lawyer, Timothy Kulp, said company officials were complying with the court order. He said buyers were offered a money-back guarantee and that many were pleased with the device's performance.
"This thing is something that people are saying works, as befuddling as it may be to some," Kulp said.
The Tracker is a plastic box a little smaller than a video cassette and can be attached to a belt. The user inserts into a slot a small card -- known as a signature card -- that purportedly contains a chip representing an illegal drug or some representation of the item to be detected.
The person then holds a companion device about the size of a television remote control to which a transistor radio antenna is attached that freely swings from right to left. The antenna then points toward the item being hunted, like an electronic divining rod.
Its manufacturers contend the static electricity produced in someone's body "charges the free-floating neutral electrons of the signature card with the major strength of the signal" and leads the person to the object.
But FBI Laboratory technicians and the Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratories both found the device to be nothing more than a hollow plastic box and the "chip" to be fake. One chip on display at a news conference Wednesday contained dead ants that had been frozen and put on paper with epoxy glue.
A report from the Sandia lab in New Mexico speculated the antenna was driven by "the Ouija board influence."
Officials said a federal probe of the company was under way and that attorneys general from Florida, Iowa, Missouri and Texas were investigating. The federal probe became centered in Beaumont after a local narcotics officer bought the device and showed the FBI how it failed to work.