FRAUDULENT SHAREBROKING.

Thames Guardian and Mining Record, Volume I, Issue 213, 14 June 1872, Page 3

FRAUDULENT SHAREBROKING.

The prosecution of the three share jobbers for conspiracy to defraud by selling shares at a fictitious value has resulted in the acquittal of the offenders ; but something has been gained to the public by the exposure of how the business of sharebroking is managed in Victoria. It is notorious that these three men are but the representatives of a numerous class who carry on speculative mining operations on a safe principle. They do not cheat in a legal sense, they keep strictly within the law, but they can calculate their gains to a nicety where oidinary men supposed speculation to be a game of chance in which the probabilities of gain and loss are about equally balanced. This is the sort of game played. One man takes up nearly the whole of the scrip issued for a company at 4d per share. He arranges with A to sell them, and to divide with him all the profit over Bd. A arranges with B and C to make sham sales in public, and run up the scrip to a shilling. Seeing the market apparently brisk in “Great Duffeis,” D, a ligitimato purchaser, buys of A in full belief that he is getting value for his money. 0 purchases them of D at a slight advance to strengthen his confidence, and D now eagerly goes in for as much of the scrip as lie can get. At last the ring have quitted the whole, and it only remains to divide the spoil. The original owner of the scrip pockets £3OO by the transaction, and the ring get £IOO. Not bad for three days’ work, and as there are plenty of pigeons always waiting to be plucked, the game of speculation must be a very rosy one. —Melbourne Leader