Freddie Figgers: The millionaire tech inventor who was 'thrown away' as a baby | Hacker News Reader

Freddie Figgers: The millionaire tech inventor who was 'thrown away' as a baby

bbc.co.uk

63 pointsmrtedbear36 comments

Take everything this guy says with a grain of salt. His phone business appears to be a scam.

These paragraphs caught my eye:

> The Figgers F3, which went on sale in 2019, contains a chip designed to enable wireless charging whenever the phone is within five metres of a "super base charger" - a device that has been awaiting approval by the FCC.

> The marketing of the F3 caused controversy, with some bloggers arguing that not all of the first model's features were as up-to-date as they said they had been led to believe.

Some quick Googling shows that the Figgers F3 is actually just a rebranded $200 Oukitel u23.

Figgers apparently claimed that the phone had wireless charging at a range of 5 meters (impossible), a Snapdragon 855 (it has a cheap MediaTek chipset), a 4K screen (it doesn't), and 1TB of storage (only 128GB built-in, but it has a microSD card slot).

You can also find press releases saying "Figgers F3 is first 5G smartphone made in America with 5-meter wireless charging" which is clearly untrue, as Oukitel is a Chinese company and the Oukitel u23 is made in China.

More drama with trying to pay off YouTube influencers can be found on Reddit. Supposedly Figgers tried to pay a YouTuber $34,000 to shill the phone, but the YouTubers have turned on them after realizing it was a scam: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/gtujqx/figgers_wir...

It appears this guy's phone company is a scam, regardless of the truth of his origin story.

His Wikipedia is interesting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Figgers

For example: “Figgers also has a license spectrum band from FCC”. The citations there are a student-run uni newspaper in Ghana, and the news site of a Florida State University radio station.

If the guy isn’t all he claims, he’s done an excellent job of layering together successive Wikipedia-credible sources and then using those as a springboard to more and more credible news stories, culminating in coverage in WashPo and the BBC.

I am pretty skeptical, but if I’m right to be, also pretty impressed by his press coverage game.

Reminds me of Citogenesis, how things repeated enough becomes truth. https://xkcd.com/978/

He's clearly in the wrong field. He should be doing PR for megacorps with these results.

This is quite common in the product world. Even before the internet we had "as seen on TV" where people would go to extreme lengths to get their product mentioned either on some magazine show or, failing that, just an informercial. They then have a circular reference which can be used to gain legitimacy when trying to get covered in a more prestigious publication.

That is a very...strange wiki. If not self written, then perhaps written based on spoken self accounts.

Also, I know of no place in Florida called "Coral Gates." Perhaps the transcriber misheard.

Hah, reminds me of InstaCharge.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/03/fiji-pm-endors...

Does anyone have any information about the "90Mhz speaker GPS shoe" that he claims he invented and sold the rights to? Google can't find any reference to it outside of similar anecdotes. It's a rather exceptional claim, based on the state of technology at the time that he would have had to have invented it. For example, how was it powered such that it was constantly transmitting on FM band and would work any old time that his dad wandered away? Also, what exactly is a "wired area network card"? Did his dad stumble around with a POE cat5 cable tethered to his shoe? Or did the BBC misquote what was supposed to be "wide area network"? Even then, it doesn't make much sense to me.

I would love to believe that this person built such a device out of old radio and computer parts, but it just doesn't seem feasible.

Probably talking about something like LoRa on 900mhz I guess?

I don't know a ton about Freddie or his communication business, so want to separate that out.

That said, the Figgers branded devices seem to be pure scamming. Chinese reclones that are outright lying about specs, from everything I've read.

There’s this really weird press release that seems to be written by a third party, in weird English: https://figgers.com/news/figgers-f3-is-made-in-america-smart...

You would think they have the sense to do 5 mins of google research on people they write about at the BBC?

> "So I got my dad's shoes, I cut the sole of the shoe open, I built the circuit board and placed it inside of the shoe with a 90 megahertz speaker, a microphone and a wired area network card," says Freddie.

None of this makes any sense.

There is a huge problem with UK journalism and these faux business stories.

Very simply: the people who write these stories are on other beats, they are usually people who don't know about business or technology or anything, and the "story" is about something else (i.e. overcoming adversity, something that gets clicks).

This may sound trite but has consequences. Various types of financial scammers (a big industry in the UK) use media outlets to write profiles on them, which they then use in marketing. Tens of millions (maybe more) have been lost because of stories like this (it isn't only newspapers, a TV show about "rich, young people"...obviously all scammers...covered one of the biggest binary option scammers, before binary options were banned, he ended up in jail shortly after for trying to run over someone he owed money to).

Slightly more worryingly: you see this kind of coverage in the business sections of some major newspapers now too (i.e. even business journalists are clueless). It is what happens when you tell students repeatedly that business is bad, and anyone who starts a business is a thief (ironically, that primes you for scammers). Additionally, journalism is mostly an upper-middle class occupation in the UK, rich ppl are left-wing here, and regard anyone who wants to work to acquire wealth with suspicion. The only exception is the FT (not always good, but their staff actually understand business at some level...surprising given that they mostly hire toffs too). But yeah...it is a real problem that feeds on itself: low integrity reporting, ppl question reporting, they just see scammers in the media, they question business...circle of ignorance.

> It is what happens when you tell students repeatedly that business is bad, and anyone who starts a business is a thief (ironically, that primes you for scammers).

Can you elaborate? I don’t think I follow.

95% of the "business" stories that the BBC covers are about people overcoming adversity or some other disadvantage. 95% of the financial scams in the UK market themselves as a way to "fight the system" or beat the rich people (look at r/SuperStonk, it isn't active knowledge, it is a moral crusade).

In both cases, the logic is: you can't win, everything is rigged, anyone who is rich already stole from you because weakness and disadvantage is morally superior, you deserve to win because you are disadvantaged...

Enter the guy, who is just a regular guy, selling you a forex trading system to settle your score with the baddies.

Btw, if you don't believe this search for forex trading scams. Almost all of them are: I was just a regular guy like you, I started with £500, now I have this shiny car (rented, ofc), and I am sharing these secret "rich person" systems with yooooooooooou...this is your only opportunity to get rich because the system is so unfair (the only way to get people to take risks that would seem stupid in any other context is crush their self-esteem, and tell them they have no other choice).

Description of fixing a broken Mac

> "As I was looking in it I saw capacitors that were broken. I had soldering guns there and I had radios and alarm clocks, so I took parts out of my father's radio alarm clock and I soldered them into the circuit board."

Were computers that repairable back then, that you could swap in bits of old alarm clocks to make them work?

You can do that today if the capacitors are the right type and value. Components are components, they're used on all sorts of products.

Maybe? Depending on which Mac he's describing here this process is technically possible, but unless he's referring to anything post-1990s it would probably require flowing the board and stepping outside most people's comfort zone, even among hobbyist electricians. I won't outright deny his story, but the odds are definitely not in his favor here (and the dubious details don't help).

Electrolytic capacitors are quite prone to failing over time and aren't difficult to replace, even on a motherboard. They are most commonly through-hole components, probably because they aren't compatible with reflow soldering. One of the features of high end motherboards is high reliability capacitors.

Based on reading the article and folks comments on this thread, though, I wouldn't trust anything this person claims.

In a different story that Mac later runs Windows 7:

https://kuulpeeps.com/2018/12/14/freddie-figgers-meet-the-29...

But there was no capacitor, it was just taken apart 5 (or 6) times. Not abandoned here either, just a crack-addicted mother.

From the same article: " “In late 2008, I started developing “Tracker”, a software program that receives GPS signals to determine the location of any cell phone, whether it is turned on or off."

How is that possible?

It's not.

Wow. In that article he wrote his own operating system and sold 600 copies, but had too many compatibility issues with Windows and so had to abandon it.

Huh.

I like how they had to translate "dumpster" into British.

Well, if they had said “skip”, how many of us on the other side of the language divide would have known what they meant?

Is it possible some of the story is real, and the phone scam is due from chinese copycats of his model?

I'll tell you the tale of Fred Figgers, The baby was found by trash diggers, He just wasn't wanted, The kids often taunted, But his confidence only grew bigger.

I have too much time on my hands.

A commenter named decremental

And to Hacker News he sent all

His very best rhymes

And wasted their times

The downvoters thought he was mental

Take some of that time and think on how well it is you can laugh about such a thing and find it so light and airy a topic you don’t feel bad considering the circumstances that would lead to someone putting anyone’s child in a Dumpster.

Are you suggesting that I should feel bad for the person who threw a baby away in the trash? The circumstances surrounding an act that heinous is that the person was an absolute monster. There are so many other options than literally throwing away a baby. Jesus Christ.

This story is not that far from Steve Jobs'. Steve was also abandoned by his parents; although via a more legit adoption, and it also played a role in how he fueled his success.

I have always thought that the particular combination in place for setting Steve Jobs on his course was the doting devotion of his older than typical dedicated and adoring adoptive parents and the fact that he was a pretty boy to his social advantage when at high school. This combination created a manipulating and charming young man who could talk to older people and command respect of less experienced peers in the necessary ways to organise their energies.

These are outdated narratives. Network effects are much more the cause of success of such people ie where they were geographically and who they were surrounded by - https://www.nfx.com/post/your-life-network-effects/

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