FORTUNE-TELLING RACKET
Gangs of women engaged in a new £lOO-a-week fortune-telling racket are travelling about the North of England in expensive motor-cars. They are finding scores of victims for whom they stage mock seances “on the spot” to remove the shadow of illness or unemployment from the household. After garaging their cars the women in couples “work” suitable streets as hawkers of charms, threatening to lay a curse ou the bouse if they’ are turned away. Unless their liouse-10-house tapping yields at least £2O a day they consider the area a poor one. In some cases wives have paid a twoguinea fee to be assured, so they believe, of future married happiness, or for cures for invalid children. The latest dodge is the selling of camphor trinkets at-£l each to immunize the family from the ’flu epidemic.
The police have declared war ou these women, but the difficulty is to get the victims to lay complaints. “People who have been duped shrink from revealing their foolishness in the courts, and tlmt if. what these women work on,” a police official said.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/DOM19390325.2.172.21.6
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Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 154, 25 March 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)
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181FORTUNE-TELLING RACKET Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 154, 25 March 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)
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