I care a lot about the environment, and I love saving money. So you can imagine how pleased I was when I received an email promising a way to lower my electricity bill by up to 90%:
Stop wasting money on electric bills! Save Each Year. Reduce Energy Consumption. Redirect Energy Loss.
This was the “StopWatt” device, telling me not to pay my electricity bill until I read this email, about their wonderous founder – Elon Musk:
“Do not pay your electric bill until you read this. As electricity prices continue to rise in, I realised that not everyone could afford solar panels, so we wanted to come up with a way that EVERYONE can save tonnes of money on their electric bill. Hurry up and learn this trick before the power companies get their way and it’s gone” – Elon Musk
This was the StopWatt, which promised me I can save money, stabilise voltage, and eliminate overheating – only one of those was something I was aware was a concern. Still, I was intrigued, especially as:
StopWatt provides your home with a smooth, stable electrical current that leads to an increase in efficiency, and reduction in dirty electricity.
Intrigued, not least to find out what they meant by ‘dirty electricity’ (spoiler: they never mentioned it again), I clicked the email’s target link, and soon found myself at a very legitimate looking news site, “News Reports”… on the rather less legitimate URL “3f0hdz-4k.myshopify.com/password”. The headline of this news report opened with a surprisingly chatty tone:
The environmental problem is pressing, isn’t it? This scorching summer weather has caused many lakes to dry up. Elon Musk is calling on everyone to conserve energy and electricity to protect the environment!
For what it’s worth, I’m as mystified by the apparent change in size of the StopWatt device from picture to picture as I am about what exactly that is in the hands of the lady stood with ‘Elon’.
That lady, for those who are unsure, is not Theresa May in a Princess Diana wig – it is Jennifer Granholm, who Google informed me was the former Secretary of Energy in the Biden administration. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one who had no idea who she was, because the AI clearly had no idea what she actually looks like.
Despite having little idea what Jennifer looks like, News Report’s article on StopWatt does seem confident about her business relationship with Musk:
When Elon Musk and Jennifer Granholm saw the environment deteriorating and lakes drying up, they became concerned and decided to make a change. Elon Musk and his team developed TrueTrack Systems Powersaver.
What is the TrueTrack Systems Powersaver? And how does it relate to StopWatt? It is unclear, because rather than tell us, News Report pivot to what it says is a report from Fox News:
“Elon Musk, the genius CEO behind solar power giant Tesla has been the talk of the town lately. His most recent controversy is a genius electricity saving invention. “
Regardless of when this was published, we can be fairly confident this was NOT Elon Musk’s most recent controversy. The site goes on to explain that the electric power companies are furious with Elon, and they want his new invention banned, but Elon is defiant, promising to slash electricity bills by 90% using his revolutionary technology. And we can see what a 90% reduction in energy costs look like, because the site presents us with “Our readers (sic) old bill vs. new bill after using Elon’s invention”.
By which they mean, the same stock image of an electricity meter, but with speech bubbles where one meter is declaring a monthly price of $251, while the second meter is shouting a lower price, in a green tone of voice.
Reducing the audible readouts of stock photo electricity meters isn’t Elon’s only motivation in producing this dimensionally-inconsistent device – he was also driven by a personal tragedy:
When tragedy struck the Tesla factory, he had to take action. Dorothy Smith was a 64 year old Tesla employee who died of a heat stroke after falling behind on her electric bills and her service was shut off in the middle of a record breaking heat wave. Her youngest daughter came to check up on her after many unanswered phone calls and tragically found Dorothy lifeless on the couch with her husband.
Poor Dorothy, the 64 year old Tesla employee who fell behind on her bills. Admittedly, while working for Tesla, so employed by Elon Musk, the apparent hero of this story. And given she and her unnamed husband couldn’t afford to pay their power bills, the natural inclination is to question Elon’s commitment to the wellbeing of his employees. Unless you’re this website, who instead give a lengthy quote from Elon, who seems oblivious to his role in underpaying Dorothy and her husband into an early grave:
The heat just got her. She had no power, no air conditioning, can you imagine? She was very prideful and ashamed to ask for help. No one knew she fell behind and couldn’t afford to pay for the high electric bills anymore.
This tragedy shook up the Tesla plant as they mourned their fallen colleague. Many employees asked me how could they help? I was personally devastated when I heard the news. Dorothy was such a kind soul and integral to the team’s success. She worked so hard and was looking forward to retiring soon.
The immoral electric power industry is completely out of control with their price gouging during these tough times. They should not be allowed to shut off power during these times and these rising prices are not sustainable for the average American family who are just trying to make ends meet.
The blame lies with those darned electric companies and their infernal greed – rather than, say, the trillionaire CEO who has to have had this poor lady on the breadline even though she was ‘integral’ to the success of Tesla.
After Dorothy’s death, I began reading all of these reports coming out showing how the price of electricity has continuously risen over the years in the USA and it was concerning because I know people are struggling to pay bills while electric company CEOs get richer.
By way of illustrating how electricity prices have grown over the last decade, the website provides an informative chart, showing an 8% rise in the years 2008 to 2017 – labelled as the last ten years. It goes on to speculate as to what prices might look like in the far flung future of 2018, 2019, 2020 and beyond.
According to the site, to remedy the situation Elon “set out to find his old drawing plans for an electricity saver invention he had made as a young genius in South Africa”.
The original drawing was based on a concept by his idol, the legendary inventor, electrical and mechanical engineer and visionary, Nikola Tesla. After a few hours of digging through old papers, he found it! … After a few weeks of work in a back room of the Tesla factory, they had a finished project. It was a source of happiness after so many weeks of sorrow mourning the death at the Tesla factory.
The result was the StopWatt, aka the TrueTrack Systems Powersaver. According to the product blurb on their website, once we’re done wading through the deeply implausible back story, it is the most important invention since the printing press, in the shape of a “small, compact” (tautological) device that you plug into a wall socket, which “stops unnecessary power from entering the electrical cables in your home and lowers your consumption”.
It is able to do this because, they claim:
all appliances draw more power than they need to run, due to inefficiencies and noise on the sine wave created by the electric companies to overcharge customers and scam them. [The StopWatt device] reduces this noise, thereby decreasing the amount of electricity used. So none is wasted.
So, the power companies pump out noisy electricity, and this widget removes the noise. Keen to see what all the fuss is about, I clicked the link, and it took me to a website “Eco Energy”, where it was simply called “New Energy Saving Device”. It cost £75.99, but if I bought it right then, it was just £36.99. But I had to hurry, because the deal was only valid for another 29m 33s, and there were only 16 items left in stock.
If you’re anything like me, your first thought is ‘what happens to this page in 29m and 34s’. Wait around and you’ll discover that the clock stops, but the number of items in stock rises to 40. Perhaps they found another box of 24 units in that half hour, or there had been a sudden rush of returns.
You don’t need me to tell you that this is a scam. Elon Musk never had anything to do with it, and nor did Jennifer Granholm. This is simply a drop shipping scam, where the cheaply manufactured product is actually available under a different name from Ali Express, costing just 75p. Sensing an opportunity for profit, a British reseller has set up a fake company, with a fake website and a fake back story, replete with bogus product claims, in order to add a 5000% mark-up.
Anyone who did put their hand into their pocket and pay the 75p it takes to get their hands on their very own New Energy Saving Device would have been sorely disappointed – they don’t work. In fact, tests conducted by Trading Standards found that electrical consumption actually increased when using the products – which makes sense, because it is an unsafe box of unknown origin that is plugged directly into your mains.
These devices do not protect you from dirty electricity, or heavy electricity, nor do they smooth out the sine waves or lower your bills. In fact, there is currently a product recall order on AliExpress specifically, due to the misleading claims attached to these products – though that product recall is not the reason the stock number kept jumping back up.
These products are also highly dangerous. Consumer affairs magazine Which? tested six similar devices, and found that they all contained evidence of lead, and six were fitted with unmarked, non-standard capacitors (which store electric charge). All but one had poor quality soldering, indicating that they weren’t manufactured to UK standards. Some lacked a fuse or other protection, or contained wires connected to an unidentifiable ‘clay like substance’, or contained a resistor set within an unidentifiable white powder-like substance… meaning they could lead to fire or electric shock.
Speaking of electric shocks, it is worth returning to poor ‘Dorothy’, the supposed Tesla stalwart who died alongside her unnamed husband from a fuel-poverty-induced heat stroke. Unsurprisingly, Dorothy is not real – or, rather her story is not. Her photo, however, is of a real tragedy: it was stolen from a CNN article about the deaths of Donna and James Mueller, struck by lightning in a thunderstorm in Washington DC in August 2022.
From the spam email, through the AI generated images and inspirational back story, this is nothing but a scam, designed to draw in people who are worried about their fuel bills amidst spiralling electricity costs, and trading on what reputation Elon Musk still has among some people as a smart guy. It ghoulishly trades on emotive stories of fake tragedies – while using real photos of real people who died.
The website which housed this fakery is no longer online – visiting it now takes you to a generic Shopify holding page, because the key to running a successful scam is never to stay in the same place for too long. It’s hard to know how many people fell for some version of this scam device, but it has to be enough to have warranted multiple investigations and product recalls – yet pages selling this device still exist, and you can still get them drop-shipped from China for a pittance.
