Earlier this week I received the following response from Steorn to an inquiry about the status of my OCube order:
Apologies again for the ongoing delay. Unfortunately we are not in a position to provide a definitive shipping date, the cells are still spiking and causing electronic failures which the guys are working hard to resolve. We’re getting there but it’s taking more time than any of us anticipated or would like and we all appreciate your patience. If you wish you may of course cancel your order and receive a full refund.
Certainly sounds a lot more optimistic than the 7-10 year timeline quoted in the recent Sunday Business Post article, but it is the same story they’ve been giving for several months now.
Speaking of refunds, a reader whom I’ve been corresponding with since February, and who ordered an OCube, reports that he’s successfully received a refund from Steorn:
Just wanted to follow up again and give you a small bit of positive news. I gave up hope after they removed the motor from their crappy demo and asked for a refund. After a bit of persistence on my part, it seems they actually did refund me the money. At least in my case, I can say they didn’t completely swindle me.
No further updates? Steorn (and those following Steorn) seem to have gone completely quiet in the last month or so.
I’m guessing that we’ll never hear from Steorn or McCarthy again. Well, that is until we see his name and his fellow conspirators’ names on the Irish circuit court lists.
It’s now more than six months since McCarthy has posted on his Facebook page, and more than three months since his ‘Orbo’ Facebook page showed any activity (which was just an apology for their video not working LOL).
McCarthy and his partners in crime are probably right now lazing in the sun, on some beach in Hawaii, Pina Colada in hand, and having a good old laugh about how they ripped off the gullible punters for millions of dollars.
I had heard – I think on this site, that there was an agm in August where they would look for more funding. I’ve been looking on the web and in the papers but there is no more news. About this time last year things started to ramp up as they were talking about their phone and power bank. But now the months tick on and nothing. What do they do day to day? Most people do something. Do they all just order expensive coffee and sit around organising meetings?
Can you really call the people who ‘own’ steorn shareholders? Since the company has not even made one euro? What do they have shares in? And how long can Steorn go on for without saying anything.
It seems their tech will not work. Perhaps they should try something else.
It must suck to apply for a job where your work experience is “10 years secretary for con artistsZ”
“Janitor at international scam association”
“Support at failed perperpetual energy company
I think we can now safely presume that Steorn is being wound up, or has already ceased operations. The last comment on Facebook from CEO Shaun McCarthy was on 26 February this year. At the least, the dire predictions made by Steorn’s “free energy” cynics has been proved valid.
One has to feel some major concern for the gullible investors in this scam that, in all likelihood, have seen the last of their $23 million. The question now is what will happen to McCarthy and his associates who carried out this financial fraud? Will they be charged with obtaining money by deliberate deception, or obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception? (A “deception” is considered deliberate when the defendant knows that what he represents as true is untrue.)
I’d be guessing that McCarthy was living on fanciful dreams and wishful thinking (at best), and quite possibly knew that so-called over-unity devices could not work, as they defy the first law of thermodynamics (at worst). And one has to ask how it could be that McCarthy and his accomplices could possibly spend around $2 million each and every year for a decade—with absolutely no positive results? A couple of Ferraris, a holiday shack on the Côte d’Azur, and a private Lear jet maybe?
McCarthy’s long -running scam reminds me of a couple of Australian scammers in the early 2000’s, John Christie and Ludwig Brits, who ran a “free energy” development company called Lutec, and who’d supposedly built a generator, the Lutec 100 which, according to Chrisie and Brits was 3000% efficient! In 2012 they, their company, and its investor funds disappeared overnight—never to be seen again.
Lutec’s website posted this early in the piece: “TEN D CLASS SHARES IN LUTEC ARE NOW AVAILABLE TO SOPHISTICATED INVESTORS ONLY. PRICE IS $100,000 EACH. APPLICATION MUST INCLUDE A LETTER FROM YOUR ACCOUNTANT CONFIRMING ‘SOPHISTICATED’ INVESTOR STATUS.” The reference to “sophisticated investors” is a way of circumventing the legal requirement for a company to issue a prospectus that complies with the ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission) regulations. It’s a detail common to fraudulent companies.
Honestly the only ones who will never see their money back are the investors. I’d be willing to bet they did not make thousands of units, maybe half a dozen potted devices that ran on 9v batteries and appeared to do something for a short time until the battery’s where flat, (but failed to produce the sort of regular power output the rather large “reference voltage” batteries could not produce for a reasonable time). They will of course refund the 2 or 3 believers they actually sent them too for publicity. They did produce thousands of cheap boxes and a few hundred plastic cases for background in their videos though.
The investors wanting to believe and already being in to the tune of several million will provide more money and the show goes on.
It never made sense to produce an ancient brick feature phone powered by these cells in the modern phone market and their power cubes which actually look like a winking red skull where also bulky and never going to be mass market. The products where all about stringing investors along, never had a chance to be mass market successes.
Take a step back they have in 10 years managed to produce no convincing evidence that they have any sort of working over unity device. A huge claim that would set the world of physics on it’s head if proved, yet totally unproven here a decade on from their famous claim.
They do not need to produce a product, get credible scientists and engineers to study what you think you have if you believe you have something like this to either prove or disprove it before asking for millions in investment, then trying to market some rather odd ball devices and failing miserably. If the technology could just be proved to work large tech-firms would beat a path to your door to license it, you don’t need to produce any products at all.
All their behavior over the past decade says investor scam, I don’t actually feel any sympathy for their investors though, as they have allowed themselves to be taken in on the strength of no real evidence that they have any over unity technology or that any such technology is possible. There is indeed one born every minutes.
Seems like in retrospect the $50,000 full page advert they put in the US newspaper was a good investment.
If you are referring to The Economist ad in 2006 that is a London publication and the ad cost $80k.
Question is – what happens now?
There is apparently an AGM in August (so within the next few weeks). Will they be funded again? Will they try and change direction and produce a different product?
7-10 more years is a long time to wait. A very long time. Maybe the shareholders will invest more in the hope for something ‘for their grandkids’
Considering ten years have already passed and they have gone through $20+ millions and have nothing to show for it, it is a fool’s investment to wait a total of twenty years for an iffy return on their investment.
But fools and their money…
This whole scenario was predicted back in December by a poster (txt29) on Metabunk https://www.metabunk.org/claim-steorns-orbo-free-energy-device-usb-charger.t7080/:
“On my mind, this is of course an investor scam in its cleanest form with absolutely no doubts. Anyone carefully looking at their past and present claims, and with just a tiny rest of common sense and basic physical knowledge, can see that their alleged free energy device is fraud. Myself I wondered what their exit plan is, and came to the following conclusion. Of course, I may be wrong, the inventive minds of con artist never stop to amaze me with new and new tricks, so perhaps they will come with something new, but for now I see the following two possibilities as the most probable:
Although they take orders, they may never start taking money and delivering the product.
After a few weeks of waiting (and trapping new naive investors in the background) they will deliver products that do not work, that they will fully refund.
I am persuaded that in both cases they will blame a faulty batch of cells or some other mishap, will ask for some patience before the new batch is ready, or they will tell that some more R&D is necessary to fix the problems. They will then refund all who paid (except the investors, of course), and the fixing will be going on for years, just like it was the case until now, and just like all other similar con artists use to do (Andrea Rossi with his eCat is an excellent example of this behavior too).
I reject the idea that they would run away with the money of the direct customers. That’s uninteresting peanuts for them. Already in the years until know they allegedly managed to get investments of at least 20 millions of euros, so changing identities and going into hiding is not an interesting option for them. What interests them are investors who want to give them money for further development, or for dealership or licenses. And with the current publicity, and all the celebration in the free energy community, the number of investors will raise exponentially. A sucker is born every second. “
Well, it was kind of obvious considering that the alternative scenario was breaking huge fundamental assumptions of science.
It’s good that they are still replying to emails and giving refunds. If you spend €1200 on a cube and got nothing that would be very bad. The reply also sounds remarkably positive.
In that email is what almost makes this so confusing. If this really as was a con why would you try so hard for so many years? It seems the funding they got was spent on wages / rent / bills etc. They didn’t run away with it. Then after so many years they could give up now. But they seem to want to continue on. Could it just be for a pay-packet? Why not get a job in another company?
Every time they are about to fold they keep going. Maybe the 7-10 years was incorrect and they will produce something in a few months. But don’t hold your breath.
Don’t forget that this little band of fraudsters has already pocketed around AU$30 MILLION of investors’ money. If anybody seriously believes that they’ve actually spent this amount on R&D, then I can also offer you a very cheap waterfront block of land. All we’ve seen so far is a varying collection of 9V batteries, bits of hookup wire, electricians’ tape, and alligator clips. Oh, and not forgetting a fuzzy video of an oscilloscope proving… uh… absolutely nothing. We’ve not seen one single, operative OCube or OPhone even after a decade of purported development. And the two female “friends” of McCarthy were nothing more than paid shills who blatantly lied about the dummy models they were pictured with, and who the both disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again LOL.
And why is it that Steorn refuses to make public the number of actual orders for their OCube and/or OPhone? What’s the big secret? Maybe there are no orders—beyond a handful of tech review sites. But I’m guessing that after making a cool 30 mil, Steorn don’t care anyway.