Nick Palmer wrote:
John Fields wrote:-
<<So what?
The refund was an admission of failure and the lack of payment of interest only means that he got to use your money, for as long as he had it, for free.>>
Errr, John - did you miss the bit where I said he offered me A$50 on top for the inconvenience?
It seems clear that SMOT is phony.
It also seems pretty clear that Greg is a liar. Too much of the picture doesn't make sense if we assume he's honest but is completely understandable if he's a habitual liar.
BUT don't assume he's (just) out to steal your money. Dishonest =/= thief. There can be many reasons for making up stories and bragging about things you claim to have done and some of those reasons may have nothing at all to do with money. Off hand it sounds to me like cheating people out of their hard-earned argent is just a side line for Greg; there's something else going on which compells him to make up stories about missing videotapes and nonexistent friends who watched a demo that never took place.
Once upon a time I new someone with (different) a first name which also happened to start with "G", who told me an incredible and obviously false story about some adventures he was having which involved ammonium tri-iodide. The story unfolded over a number of weeks, and in the end the film he'd made of the climactic incident in the story vanished unexpectedly just before he could show it to me to prove it was all true. Sound familiar? Aside from the substitution of a nifty home-made energy source for a nifty home-made explosive, the only difference, really, is that the "G" who told me this was someone I knew in the Youth Choir at my church and there was absolutely no possibility of his making any money out of it, nor out of any of his other little lies which I occasionally noticed.
The "G" I knew must be in his 40's today, and he's presumably been honing his storytelling skills for the last 30 years. If you met him on the Internet you might very well never catch on to the fact that many of his accomplishments are fictitious.
So I'd say that as a character, Greg is extremely plausible, even if his story isn't.
(Let this be a lesson to everyone involved in the free-energy field...)
