Giving critique on the claims based on engineering principles is just fine.
Organized anti-campaigns - or spamming - aren't.
I agree.
Just keep calling out any incorrect, deceptive or stupid technical claims. But no need to tell engineers that, it's what we do
Is that enough to stop the flood of scams and snake oil stuff?
I understand stupidity is the most difficult illness to cure in humanity, that requires a very strong focus on education and even reformulate the ways to teach and stimulate people to learn (I believe a sophisticated Active Learning is the best way).
But the worst part of this is that certain organizations like corporations such as IGG close their eyes to scams such as this because they get the money anyway, despite many people inform them about the false promises of the project and the lack of scientific facts about being not possible to do.
Who are the worst ones in this scheme? Batteriser ones aren't, they "just" are tricky liars on an ecosystem that makes it easy to scam people. The worst part of this are the crowdfunding platforms such as IGG, they look elsewhere and get their percentage as any corrupt organization.
It's cool to make videos and have your name on some mass media, we live on a world where being known and famous can give you many advantages. But if close you are doing it in both a very educative and entertaining way, you deserve it a lot much more than all these movie stars.
Maybe debunking isn't enough, maybe legal and stronger educative action is necessary to stop stupid consumers and penalize scammers.
I think that the involved teacher must be known to be part of a scam and his university should take actions against his lack of ethics. Maybe there's even there's an student organization in the university that can protest about it too.
It's not about bullying them, they are already doing it with proxy entities to some activists as you see. They have money to make cool videos and lie people without the minimal scientific knowledge to understand it (something I consider it a massive fail of most educative systems/methodologies, of course), those aren't a bunch of occasional eBay scammers but something a lot more serious with big money that need to be stopped ASAP.
There's more like them, this could kill the crowdfunding ecosystem that made possible to do nice products without need to get loans or be under other kind of corporate slavery.
It's funny to debate and rant all time, but this shit is a lot more serious than it seems and there's need to do something about it. Crowdfunding is becoming a bubble that a lot of shady opportunists are taking advantage of it, this needs to change to make it a sustainable business model.