I've spent a few days looking into the man behind the "coronavirus detector" unveiled by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. You can see him testing a patient and his mobile phone in the video below. His name is Kambiz Golshani and he's been selling various versions of this for 11 years https://twitter.com/Shayan86/status/1250453534342033413

He claims to own a company called Pouyan Kavosh (PK). There seems to be a compnay website where he sells his range of detectors with a PK product tag: Airplane detector, dead body finder, water finder, wood researcher, researcher of all oil products, fuel detector, etc.

No Covid-19 detector on there. But there's a fuel detector which is a copycat of the Covid-19 device he was using at a hospital. Note the cheaply-made product tag on both. UK frauds were more professional with product tags. Also note the poorly-written product description

All PK products are basically the same, with slightly altered descriptions. Some gems: identify mines from behind several mountains and several different obstacles, identification of human bodies up to 300m. Water finder obvious enough not to need any description it seems

Let's look at the pricing for these bogus devices. Human finder is 120m Iranian tomans ($28k), dead body finder 85m tomans ($20k), water finder is 90m tomans ($21k), mine detector 1bn tomans ($230k). All the products disappeared from the website a couple of days ago

Now let's look at Mr Golshani's history. He first claimed to have "invented" a mine detector in 2009. The PK100B, he said, had been the result of eight years of research. 2009-10 is about the time @carolinehawley and @MeirionTweets started publishing their investigations

Two years ago, Mr Golshani unveiled a new "invention". A device that can detect any solid or liquid matter within a distance of 42km, even under the ground or water, based on "electrostatic impact" and "bipolar magentic fields". Same device as before

He attempted to regsiter an "explosive detector" as an "invention" at Iran's Intellectual Property Office three years ago. But his device is basically a repurposed version of a debunked bomb detector known as Sniffex

@s7az2mm checked the brochure for Mr Golshani's "explosive detector" device and compared it with that of the known fake bomb detector HEDD1. Very similar indeed. HEDD1 has been described as "Sniffex with a battery stuck on it"

There are several videos of Mr Golshani on the internet. In almost all of them, he is demonstrating how one of his detectors can spot things. @factnameh, which is an independent fact-checking service, has found no evidence that he has a scientific or academic background

Since the Covid-19 detector was unveiled, there has been some pushback by Iran's scientific community. The Physics Society of Iran described the claim that the device could detect coronavirus as "pseudoscience", "unbelievable" and on a par with "sci-fi tales".