DEAR SIR: You are hereby notified that ticket No. 5,114, has drawn a gold watch, valued at two hundred dollars. Five per cent. on the valuation is ten dollars. The percentage must be paid or forwarded within twelve days from the date of this notice.
Those receiving prizes, in the preliminary drawing, receive them with this understanding, that they will either buy tickets in our grand distribution that takes place in November, or use their influence in every possible way to sell tickets. Any parties receiving this notice, who are not willing to assist in our grand enterprise, will please return the ticket and notice as soon as received.
HALLETT, MOORE & Co.,
Bankers and Financial Managers,
575 BROADWAY, NEW YORK.
By Order of the
NEW YORK JEWELLERS' CO-OPERATIVE UNION.
N. B.—No prizes will be shipped until the percentage is received.
We shall be ready in fifteen days to fill orders for tickets in the grand distribution of five millions of dollars' worth of goods, the drawing of which is to take place in the building of the New York Jewellers' Cooperative Union, November 16, 1868. By order of the BOARD OF DIRECTORS.
The person receiving this circular well knows that he has purchased no ticket in the above concern, and at once supposes that he has received through mistake the notification intended for some other man. Still, as the parties offer to send him, for ten dollars, a watch worth two hundred dollars, he cannot resist the temptation to close with the bargain at once. He sends his ten dollars, and never hears of it again.
Another plan is to notify every one who has bought a ticket that he has drawn a prize, and demand five per cent. on it. The value is always stated at two hundred dollars, and the amount asked is ten dollars. Strange as it may seem, this ruse succeeds in a majority of instances. The luckless ticket holders are delighted with their good fortune, and send the assessment at once. They never see their money or their prize.
The scoundrels who carry on these enterprises feel perfectly safe. They know that their victims dare not prosecute them, as by purchasing a ticket a man becomes a party to the transaction, and violates the laws of the State of New York. No one cares to avow himself a party to any such transaction, and consequently the swindlers are safe from prosecution.
The post-office authorities of the city state that over five hundred letters per day are received in this city from various parts of the country, addressed to the principal gift establishments of the city. Nearly all of these letters contain various sums of money. Last winter these mails were seized and opened, by the Post-office Department, and some of the letters were found to contain as much as three hundred dollars.