[WANT AD. FAKERS.]
THE PETTY DOLLAR SWINDLERS PUT OUT OF BUSINESS IN CHICAGO BY DETECTIVE CLIFTON R. WOOLDRIDGE.
The cheap little grafter who takes dollars, dimes, nickels and pennies from the poor, while not exactly a great financier, is one of the smoothest propositions with which secret service men and federal inspectors are confronted. His main hold is on the public press, because he operates through the seemingly innocuous want advertisement.
The statements of some advertisers may be taken literally; some should be taken with caution, and some should not be taken at all. In the postoffice department at Washington, in the files of the assistant attorney general, one may study the methods of the black sheep of the advertising fold against whom fraud orders have been issued. A fraud order is an order directed to a postmaster forbidding him to deliver letters to a certain person or concern or to cash money orders for them.
If a man swindles his neighbor without using the mails the postoffice department will not interfere with him, although the police may, but if he attempts to make Uncle Sam a party to the swindle, the old gentleman lets loose on him a horde of postoffice inspectors, who not only put a stop to the business, but frequently put the swindler himself behind the bars. The department issues year in and year out an average of one fraud order a day, and an examination of the reports of the inspectors who have investigated these cases is apt to convince one that the long-accepted estimate that there is a sucker born every minute is much too low. The schemes most commonly employed are here set forth.
Home Work Scheme Catches Many.
The chance to earn a few dollars a week without leaving home appeals to many women whose household duties occupy the greater part of their daylight hours. Unfortunately the work-at-home scheme catches not only the woman whose object is merely to earn a little pin money and who in many cases can afford to lose a dollar or two without suffering any hardship as a consequence, but it gathers in as well the working girl eager to add to her scanty earnings by engaging in some remunerative work at home.
The work-at-home scheme is operated in a variety of ways, but the underlying principle is the same in all cases. Sometimes the work to be done consists in embroidering doilies or in making lace, and in other cases it consists in filling in with gilt paint price tickets printed in outline. In all cases the work is described as easy, the advertisements assuring the reader that experience is unnecessary. In all cases, too, the victim is obliged to buy, from the promoters of the scheme, "materials" or a lace-making machine or some other object before she is given any work. The following description of a scheme against which a fraud order was issued last May will make clear the methods pursued by all fakers of the work-at-home class. The advertisement in this case reads as follows:
Home Work, $9 to $15; No Canvassing.