THE MAJOR INGRAM FRAUD CASE - Major Charles Ingram

In the Major Ingram case, a rising officer of the British Army and MENSA achiever answered the challenge of ITV's quiz show "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?", hoping to win £32,000 that he wanted for domestic reasons, and he worked his way through all the questions and won the full prize of £1,000,000 offered. But the TV company refused to pay up, accusing him of cheating. The Major took this blow with the dignity of an officer and soldier who had been in action before, and he was prosecuted for fraud in our criminal courts, where he was convicted.

The prosecution against this army officer was based on the TV company's theory that in answering the questions, Major Ingram had used the assistance of an acquaintance in the audience, who was also challenging for a spot on the show. The company's case was based on the coughing of this third party, who coughed throughout Ingram's performance, as did others, and their theory was that when Major Ingram read out the four options to a question as he mulled them over, the man in the audience coughed to identify the right answer for him. Since the acquaintance had coughed throughout his performance and that Major Ingram had spent some time in concentration over most of the questions, their case means that the third party must have answered most of the questions for him.

The criminal prosecution was based on this theory, which succeeded in turning the rising army officer and MENSA achiever into an intellectual dud, and the unsuccessful challenger as the successful intellect (except that he wasn't in a position to win the prize), and it has the Major as being lucky with his strategy (though he was evidently not lucky with his winnings), and it has Major Ingram as the cheat instead of the TV company itself, with the TV company profitting, and Major Ingram robbed of his prize. These reversed values in a trial equation are worth noting because they can identify a central hypocrisy. Another interesting symmetry in this case is that the prosecution has the third party producing Major Ingram's performance, which reflects the professional psychology of TV people.

The defence side of the equation is that Major Ingram had worked his way through the questions himself, using either logical deduction or sometimes deep memory, in other words intelligence, and that the TV company has confused this with cheating.

There are many problems with the prosecution case. To begin with, neither the programme's question master, Chris Tarrant, nor Major Ingram, nor the TV audience at home, heard any of the coughing, and it wasn't until a boosted off-air recording was produced by the TV company for the criminal prosecution that anyone knew of it.

Another problem is that the idea for the scam isn't credible or realistic. Even if the third party had had mobile phone contact with a team of friends with encyclopedias it would not be feasible.

This quiz show is unusually well designed by today's standards, beginning with joke questions to help the contestant settle in with the cameras and so forth, and then proceeding with easy questions to aid concentration, and through this process the contestant would be able to tackle any such questions that might be answerable to deep subconscious memory or to logical deduction, these getting progressively harder as the prize rises in value. It follows the progressive design of the Raven test. If the Major had undertaken the challenge with the system that he was accused with, his success would be entirely dependent on it, because he would not be able to develop the concentration needed to progress by himself. So either he would need to know the answer immediately or else the other would, and if neither did, his bid must fail.

Major Ingram used all three of the assists that WWTBAM? offers its contestants, and this shows that he needed them, and that his performance was in accordance with the game's rules. He used the "Ask The Audience" option for a pop TV question about Coronation Street (they were after all a mass TV audience), and the "Phone A Friend" option for the River Foyle question (and he went with his friend's suggestion), and he used the "Fifty-Fifty" option for the Craig David/A1 pop song question, and here, his performance shows that he needed to simplify the job of recalling the answer from his memory.

In this Craig David/A1 question, Major Ingram clearly had difficulty in discerning which was the right answer, but in reading out the two options aloud as he mulled them over, he did not leave sufficient time between A1 and Craig David for his alleged coughist to cough if A1 had been the right answer and if this had been the function of reading the options out or the coughing. This undermines the prosecution contention that this was why he was reading the options out. In this question, the prosecution case cited an audience gasp when he decided to go for A1 as being the reason that he changed his mind, but in that case also, it was no business of the prosecution to use it in their case of conspiracy to cheat.

In the Holbein question, a single cough was heard, but Ingram had selected his final answer straight away, and the same occurred with the next question (Anthony Eden), but he mulled this one over before making it his final answer.

In the Emmental question Ingram's performance was the same as in the other questions, but there were no coughs. He was evidently using subconscious memory, and thinking aloud, which requires concentration. This instance demonstrates that the same applied with the questions where there were coughs. Another question that was used against him was the Jacqueline Kennedy one, which is relatively easy.

In the Googol and Paris questions, his performance is self-evidently consistent with deductive logic, carefully isolating the least likely option as the right answer, which it was. These clearly functioned as trick questions.

In the last question, Googol, the answer is actually accessible to logic because it is composed of the materials that identify it as the right answer. There are two 'g's in it (American for 1,000: a "grand"), and three zeros (1,000 again), and a lower-case 'L', which serves as a '1'. It is evident from this that the word Googol was created by an American to represent the mathematical figure that was the subject of the question. This, and the fact that it was the only option that did not look obviously like a technological word, would help to identify it as the likely right answer.

In this last question, there were two coughs in rapid succession after Ingram read out the word Googol for the last time, and there were two more shortly after this without any mention of this word, and there were two more coughs in rapid succession again when Ingram decided to go for it and without any mention of the word. This cannot be taken to be a signal that the word was the correct answer, and his wife's torture in her seat when she realized that he was risking the £468,000 indicates that there was no coughing system to his performance.

To understand the defence, it is necessary to understand not only the professional psychology of TV people, but also that of the MENSA achiever and the rising Major in the British Army. The fact that neither government nor the press was able to do this should be a matter of concern to everyone.

To achieve professional advance and excellence one has to develop the compunction to challenge oneself and to achieve in them, and in the course of a career this hunger becomes basic to one's psychology. The irony in Major Ingram's position is that if he had won his million it would have undermined his future career in the Army because it would have undermined his ambition for it. There would have been a subconscious conflict of interest between himself and his wife here, because his wife would have wanted the £1,000,000 while Major Ingram's career would not. The same applies to the £468,000 that he was prepared to gamble on the last of the questions, having won the £32,000 that he had hoped to get. No one can willingly throw away £468,000 and the reason for his doing this must be due to his professional psychology, and also to the nature of the challenge presented to him. He was a Major in the British Army and a MENSA achiever after all. The psychology behind Major Ingram's gamble on this last question is evidently that of daring and bravery (the soldier), sound judgment (the officer), and the successful achiever in intelligence tests.

The witness in whom the suspicion of a scam appears to have originated was a fellow contestant who was annoyed by Tecwen Whittock's coughing. He testified at the trial that he had known the answer to the Googol question himself, having encountered it a couple of times in quizzes before. In his testimony, he made it clear that he was very annoyed by the coughing and that he was displeased by the Major's success with this question. The reason for his suspicions can be detected logically from the elements of this situation. These were that he was annoyed at the coughing; that he was frustrated that he knew the answer to the £1,000,000 question himself but that someone else won the prize money; that the Major had won it through logical deduction and daring rather than through familiarity, so that the witness didn't recognize the means or the method. This brings the "knowing the answer" and "the coughing" annoyance together in his suspicions.

Another part of the prosecution theory concerned his wife’s anxious glances in the direction of the third party, their alleged coughist, which the prosecution interpreted as being her urging him to answer her husband’s question for him. Her behaviour was certainly anxious, but the innocent reason for why she repeatedly glanced in his particular direction would have been that, her husband being the source of her anxiety, her friend was the only other person in this strange and stressful situation who offered her a sense of domestic familiarity and emotional stability. That stress was the cause of her behaviour is undeniable because of the backlash that her husband got after the show, when she off-loaded it on to the source of it, namely the intrepid Major.

In fact Mrs Ingram's stress and emotional backlash after the show demonstrates again that there was no such strategy in Major Ingram's performance, especially in relation to the Googol question, because if there had been one then the outcome would show that there was no risk. Her stress was logically caused by the risk to the £468,000 that her husband had already won, and it shows that she had no knowledge of why he was risking this as his reason and his instinct (and his daring) were locked inside his own thoughts at the time. Her stress confirms that he did not cheat.

There is a perfectly innocent explanation for why Major Ingram read out the answers aloud as he considered them, which is firstly, that he was mulling the options over in company; secondly, that he was engaging the audience in his performance and that he recognized his duty to the audience; and thirdly, that he was an army officer and therefore was in the habit of talking while making decisions in the performance of his duties.

A logical examination of the prosecution case shows that it is founded entirely on a lack of intelligence or thought, both in its structure and in its pretence, and that it is based on a failure to recognize these qualities in Major Ingram's performance. In fact the entire case against Major Ingram is an attack against his intelligence by the media and other interested parties.

In any court equation a central factor in the case is that of true motive, and it is necessary to determine on which side of the equation it belongs. In this case the motive is given by the prosecution as "greed", but the defendant's risking of £468,000 suggests that it doesn't belong on his side, so we should look at the prosecution side of the equation. And here the motive factor appears on several counts. It appears in its case against Major Ingram, and it also appears on a second count as well, because, if greed motivates the contestants on the TV show, then the designers of the show have created that greed. The implication therefore is that they have created Major Ingram's greed in their prosecution both ways. The question that remains is whether the TV company is also responsible for the "greed" factor on a third point, namely the motive behind this particular fraud case. Major Ingram's performance on the Googol question and the TV company's success in taking the money from him suggest that it is. There is a fourth motive factor too, which is the contempt that our TV service has for public intelligence and talent nowawadays, and also their exploitation of the public generally. This also informs their prosecution.

A prosecution has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and the case against Major Ingram fails to do this in every particular. All the points of the prosecution case have an innocent explanation to them which is consistent with the evidence, and only the defence corresponds fully with the evidence.

The judge at the conviction used the threat of jail to forbid Major Ingram to defend his case or continue his struggle on TV, so that the judge banned him from using the very medium that created his cheat to undo it. The injustice of this arises from two injustices within the trial, the first being the TV company's refusal to pay his winnings on the basis of its cheat theory, and the second being that he was prosecuted for criminal fraud at all, because this trial was based on a misuse of the term fraud. It is surely not in the interests of the nation that a TV company should be allowed to use the criminal courts to protect its game rules, or that it should be allowed to make criminals out of its customers or out of British citizens. The audacity behind this corresponds with the audacity behind the cheat theory and the prosecution. Major Ingram was a customer of theirs, and he had responded to the challenge of the quiz along with many others who are tarred with the term "greed" by this company. Any such dispute is a commercial and civil dispute requiring a public tribunal to determine whether he had found a way round their rules, and if he agreed that it was so, how much he should get in exchange for the information as to how it was done, so that the TV company could prevent it happening again. This would be the honourable outcome. However this would be worthless to the TV company in this case because he clearly did not cheat.

The first injustice has led to the others, and rippling out naturally from this sequence is another injustice, because the Army, on the strength of this conviction, stripped Ingram of the rank that he had earned and the pension that went with it, and threw him out of the Army. The Army Board of Inquiry did not do the job of inquiring into the situation presented to it, and this again continues the theme of lack of intelligence in the case against Major Ingram.

The logical resolution of this case has the fraud and the hypocrisy factor on the prosecution's side of it, and there is no evidence for fraud on the defence side, either political or actual.

This case has a TV company robbing an intellectually unsuitable customer of the £1,000,000 that he won on its TV show by making an idiot out of him, then using our police and criminal courts to secure its money and off-load the wrong on to the victim. This is in keeping with common practise in our television companies, which are using members of the public to "entertain" the public while they themselves are raking in all the dosh. The nation itself is being cheated.

For the Algebra of Justice click here.

For a geometric tesseract of deception and pretence click here.

For the Michael Brookes case click here.

blackneck@gawab.com