CONFIDENCE MEN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 January 1942, Page 6

CONFIDENCE MEN

ACTIVITIES IN AUSTRALIA. VICTIMS LOSE LARGE SUMS. •'A warning has been issued by the police to people who might invest in mine shares to beware of three confidence men who have been operating in Victoria and New South Wales in the last few months. Their known victims are a man with big interests in the motor trade, a grazier, and the widow of a grazier. These people have been defrauded of large sums. The trick by which they induce their victims to give them money is not new. Police say it has been worked in almost every part of the world. The confidence men, who are well dressed and plausible, book accommodation at expensive city hotels. They pick out their victims, and one of the confidence men approaches them at an opportune time and asks whether they have shares in a certain Canadian goldmine, which does not in fact exist. After he has gained the confidence of the intended victim he says that he has found a man who holds shares that he wishes to purchase because of their money-making possibilities. A second confidence man then appears and after a price has been agreed upon, the third confidence man enters. He offers to double the option price, and eventually the victims are induced to share in the option at the increased price.

The cash is paid over, and the bogus scrip is signed over in the name of the victims. Then two of the confidence men insist on open scrip, and the victims agree to write a letter to the secretary of the goldmine in Canada. The scrip is enclosed in letters which one of the confidence men agrees to send by registered post. The letters are registered, but later the victims receive them back from the Dead Letter Office, not with open scrip but with pieces of blotting paper enclosed. The confidence men have replaced the bogus scrip with the blotting paper before they registered the letter to some imaginary address in Canada. By this fraud the wealthy business man was induced to pay 30 £lOO notes in the lounge of a city hotel; the grazier paid about £l3OO, and a grazier’s widow parted with £1250.