YouTube's fraudulent adverts for electric heaters
by Stephen Hewitt | Published
In Britain in January and February 2024 YouTube was showing fraudulent adverts for electric heaters. These included claims such as “It can warm up rooms in minutes, costing only a few pennies per day.”, “uses less energy than non ceramic heaters”, “used 89% less energy compared to regular heating systems”. The adverts linked to websites that declared a business address in Lithuania.
In reality all resistive electric heaters are essentially 100% efficient, so any advert making a claim of higher efficiency can be identified as a scam instantly. The only way to obtain more heat for the same amount of electricity would be with a heat pump, which these heaters are not. One of the adverts said that an inventor had “made a special device that creates a perpetual heating loop”, a phrase reminiscent of a perpetual motion machine. It also claimed that he used a “a dual Thomson physics principle”.
These advertisements consisted of film footage without sound but with voiced-over narration by a native English speaker. The footage included miscellaneous generic images of people such as students in a library, images of the product, and images like the second photograph and people whom the viewer was left to presume were the inventor(s).
In each advert the narration told a story of a purported new invention. In one the inventor was a student “from UK” (not “the UK”) called Jason. Intrigue was added by an allegation of corruption: “When a heating company offered him millions for the rights, Jason firmly declined. As a consequence he was expelled just three days later.”. This product was called HeatFlow, with a linked website getheatflow.com where you could buy it.
Two adverts shared a narrative script, with only the name and appearance of the product different. In this script, “This powerful heater was created by Mike Saunders and Robert Jones” after “years of research and testing”. In one advert these supposed inventors named their invention Ecotherm and in another one they named it LumiWarm.
The Ecotherm advert had a link to a website to getecotherm.com where you could buy it, and the LumiWarm advert had a link to getlumiwarm.com where you could buy it.
The adverts stated that the product was not available from Amazon or from stores.
In January 2024, the website getecotherm.com contained the following statement:
EcoTherm (hereinafter referred to as the “EcoTherm”, “we”, “us”, “our”) is a brand name used and operated by a business entity UAB CommerceCore, which is a limited liability company incorporated in the State Enterprise Register of Lithuania, company No. 302566167, with registered office address at Savanorių pr. 363, Kaunas, Lithuania.
The same business name and address was also given on getheatflow.com
An archived snapshot of a page from these websites is at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/OEXwO and another is at https://archive.is/QoCTP