Someone in the company hears about LRL's, possibly from a purveyor of such. The purveyor quickly figures out that the company guy is clueless about this stuff, so the purveyor makes a bunch of claims regarding what some LRL gizmo can achieve in underground infrastructure locating. (We're obviously talking a really expensive gizmo here, thousands of dollars, not a priced-for-the-public Ranger-Tell.) The company guy is all excited, and places an order for one.
The story gets to marketing dept., who are similarly excited and want to advertise the new capability they're about to get. As though they already had it. After all, by the time the ad actually goes into print, they'll have the new gadget, right? No harm, no foul. Marketing dept. can't really describe what "ion detection" means in this context (obviously not referring to litmus paper) because they don't know, nobody's told them.
That's my theory of how this strange episode began. Company never intended to defraud anyone, they themselves got took and the timing was bad.