Investors taken in by bogus technology

THE ST PETERSBURG TIMES has a yarn about how a bloke called Brent Kovar who managed to get millions of dollars from investors for a satellite product which probably did not exist.

Kovar used to usher tech people and investors into a room to look at a box which could speed up satellite internet connections. He would conduct his presentation from a theatre nearby and pretend he was bouncing the signal off a satellite. In fact his monitor was connected directly to the other one in the presentation room by some low tech cabling.

One employee smelt a rat when he noticed that a satellite aerial, which was crucial to the operation, fell over without hurting the signal. Another was also surprised that her boss told her to add the occasional two second delays to her presentation because "no one will believe that this is so fast."

After a few years of getting large amounts of investor cash, Kovar finally got hammered for $36-million in a court case in Pinellas County. Investors claimed that he had nicked the technology he invented when the outfit went belly up. Kovar was supposed to give them the technology as a company asset. When he did this it became fairly clear to the court that the box he had shown to investors was just a "hunk of junk".

Kovar is believed to have taken $21 million from investors. He is supposed to be re-organising his company under a new name, World Capita Communications. The company now owns a Kovar patent for a formula that compresses data for satellite transmission. Kovar still has a Hummer parked outside his house.

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