The glasses had the disembodied bones of a human hand painted under the finish of the lenses. The app shows fish in any water body you can point to with your phone.

Uploaded on 29 Jan 2012, the ‘How To Use the FishFinder app in iphone’  video on YouTube comes up quite frequently in searches done for ‘iphone fish finder’.   It’s been viewed 100,000 times since it debuted last year.  The video is presented as the testimonial of a British consumer, a recreational fisherman who claims to have used the app to catch fish the night before.  It cannot be true.  The video was made entirely to deceive viewers into purchasing a fake three dollar app.

The narrator  never shows his face nor offers any explanation about how the phone could possible acquire the information it shows on screen, which looks like a very accurate and easy-to-read fishfinder display comparable with the most expensive units on the market. Viewers listen as he describes how, in the previous evening he used the Fishfinder iPhone app  ‘to catch a 28lb common’ as he says, and again at the end of the video he says ‘to catch a cranking 28lb specimen.’

The narrator makes no mention whatsoever of the technology at work inside the iphone – it would be indeed be a marvelous piece of machinery that could send sonar signals through the air to penetrate the water or as the narrator calls it, ‘the swim’ and identify the presence of anything therein of any size.

HOW DOES IT WORK? It doesn’t work as a fishfinder, but making the whole sonar deception is reasonably sophisticated. The app requires the user take a picture of ‘the swim’ just so it can recognize the dimensions of the water body and create the appropriate response. The app then plays the same sonar sound effect from the 1954 Hollywood movie, Jules Verne 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Eventually it will model the digital readout according to the dimension of the water body in the photo and show different size fish at various depths as you can see in the video.

Even gag products like X-Ray Glasses sold in comic books thirty years ago gave some clue as to their actual composition, and their true value proposition… Note the word ILLUSORY in the sales copy.

The description left by the developers in the Apple store does not clearly specify that this is a gag item; they write, “Fishfinder app simulates a sonar detection system which shows information on the swim you are fishing in such as depth of river/lake, contour of river/lake, size of fish in cms, distance fish are away from you in meters.   Fool your fishing mates into thinking that your iphone is able to show the fish in their swim!”  And the You Tube video is even worse – that narrator shamelessly extols the merits of the app and ends with a call to action advising viewers purchase the app.  The comments have been disabled on the YouTube video so its not possible for people to leave any warnings.

Carp Lakes has other mobile software products on the market which do seem to be altogether reputable and are getting good reviews. You would think someone would have complained about the fake Fishfinder App on their discussion forum yet there is no thread I could find on the subject.  yet their discussion forum makes no mention of the social malaise of misleading fishermen into believing this app could possible work. Playing the part of an investigative blogger, on behalf of the FishHunter blog and in the name of all reputable iPhone fishfinders, I have left this thread in the app developer’s discussion forum asking if they are troubled by the video’s deception ?

If ever anyone needed a reminder that these are still the early ‘wagons west’ days of the mobile phone apps , it would be the presence of gag apps and fraudulent testimony supporting their efficacy.  This is #ifraud.

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