The Iraq car bombing that claimed almost 300 lives on July 3 was blamed by some on the ineffectiveness of a fake bomb detector. Originally developed as lost golf-ball finders, the so-called ADE-651 devices were fraudulently marketed to Iraq and other nations over the last decade as handheld bomb detectors by a British businessman now sitting in jail. But police in Baghdad are still deploying the widely condemned devices at security checkpoints across the city.

So, why are they still being used? An officer using one told the Washington Post simply: “We haven’t received an order yet… We know it doesn’t work, everybody knows it doesn’t work, and the man who made it is in prison now. But I don’t have any other choice.” Experts say the toxic mix of corruption and wishful thinking that fueled this debacle shows just how dysfunctional key militaries in the Middle East and even in the West can be.

Though it’s hard to point the finger at any one specific failure of security as the authorities are still investigating the attack, many Iraqis have vented their anger at the ADE-651 (short for “Advanced Detection Equipment”). There is little doubt the fraud behind it has been deadly in recent years.

“It’s impossible to know how many lives these fake wands have cost to Iraq, but it’s not zero and it’s likely to be quite significant,” says Kyle W. Orton, a Middle East analyst at the Henry Jackson Society think tank in the U.K.

Amidst intense public outcry, Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi finally abolished the use of the controversial device after the attack. Yet the story of how Iraqi soldiers and police continued to wave around at checkpoints what might best be compared to dowsing rods, almost a decade after their government recognized them as a fraud, is so bizarre it beggars belief.

The scam spun off of a 1990s lost golf ball detector toy—the FBI reportedly declared an early drugs-and-explosives focused prototype a fraud all the way back in 1996. The devices claimed to work with nuclear quadrupole resonance but reportedly contained no functional electronics; users were sometimes advised to drag their feet on the ground to generate static electricity that would “prime” them.

Yet the gadgets kept popping up around the world for decades. Using aggressive marketing techniques, a group of fraudsters sold them in different versions to gullible governments and security firms as diverse as of those in Mexico, Thailand, China, Lebanon, Kenya, and several Eastern European countries. Violence-ridden Iraq, desperate for any help against bombs, became the largest client after the mid-2000s, reportedly purchasing over $80 million worth of the devices—which typically sold for around $8,000 each and often had little more than sturdy packaging to them than did the $20 Gopher.