An Investment for the Gullible

If you have a viable idea for a product and cannot interest any legitimate investment sources, crowdfunding is a way to go.

When we wrote about Scorkl (Undercurrent July 2017), we said the product could endanger untrained users with the hazards of lung damage associated with free-diving combined with breathing compressed air.

The small cylinder of gas is a concept familiar to many scuba divers. In fact, it's been marketed for decades: Spare Air, a small 3 cu. ft. cylinder of gas that you decant from your scuba tank. In conjunction with its built-in regulator, it might be good enough to see you safely to the surface from 60 feet, should your main supply fail for some reason.

However, the enterprising marketers of Scorkl aimed a similar product at the general public, combining it with a hand pump for what they claimed was easy filling.

You'd have to be immensely fit and strong to be able to manually pump one of these cylinders to a pressure that would make it usable underwater. Nevertheless, their advertising video featured a lithe bikini-clad young woman who seemed to have no problem pumping, and another was seen swimming carefree underwater with the device dangling precariously from her mouth.

Furthermore, the pollution of that air by the lubricating oil of the pump could make it a health hazard too -- but nobody got to discover that because after more than two years, the company has failed to deliver any products.

Regardless, the idea was sufficiently appealing for other entrepreneurs to offer similar products with alternative names (e.g., Scopel and Smaco), all looking suspiciously like Spare Air but with a different label.

We dismissed the idea as a total failure, but what looks like a failure to some can represent a great success for others,; the ill-informed, by pre-ordering Scorkl through Indiegogo and Kickstarter, ponied up $3 million for a facsimile of Spare Air that has already been around for 40 years.

Luckily, nobody has been killed yet, but we bet there are a few unlucky investors with homicidal thoughts.