The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-09-27

ceipt of tales of woe from individuals who have invested sizable sums of money with New York and Chicago swindIers claiming to conduct specuIa- tive business, who operate entirely through the mails These outfits are broken up by the United States post office authorities as soon as their fraud ulent character is clearly established, but it seems impossible to drive these fellows who run the elleged investment agencies wholly out of business.
 ''The games too easy for them, and they are fully aware of the great dith- culty found in convicting them. AS soon as one brokerage firm that car ries on it's business entirely by mail IS smashed the men who have been sue cessfully conducting 1t simply move down to another book and open up an~ other brokerage office under another firm name The shift only involves their getting out another batch of lite rature. The thousands and thousands of dollars which these sharpers take in year in and year out from people whose way of expressing themselves on paper make it patent that they are educated men and women is q perpetual source of astonishment to me.
 "The smaller fry of the mail sWlndlers are the fellows who advertise that they will send solid gold watches and all 1 that sort of thing upon the receipt or l one dollar Now, doesn't it seem req ! sonable to imagine that any man or wo- mane sane enough to run loose in a civ l ilized community ought to know per fectly well that a solid gold watch, or 1 whatever other article it may be, per l haps a genuine diamond ring, cannot 1 be bought for the sum of one dollar? And yet there are responses to these ads reaching literally into the millions, and the promoters of these lodges near ly always get rich. Last year we rout- ed out a fellow in Boston who adver- tfsed in a very elaborate and splurgy fashion throughout the country that he had got hold of a lot of lucky stones on his travels through India, which he was willing to purvey by mall upon the receipt of a dollar per stone. The mon- ey that chap got was something fabu- lous, The dollars were just rainng ir when the inspectors swooped down or his office and cleaned him out. He didn't care then whether he was cleaned out or not. He had got the money.
 Something over year ago the de
 partment nailed clever woman, who was operating her little dodge down 1T Florida-a woman of tremendous shrewdness this one was sure enough She advertised and sent out circulars t'
 the effect that she was natural borl healer of any old disease that was eve
 included in medical book, mental 0
 physical, and she set forth the fact thai
 if anything, she was some better as al
 absent healer than she was as a con
 tact healer All the person afflicted
 with any sort of disease had to do wa
 to hike a five dollar note along to her | and she would spend five minutes at
 certain hour of the day or night think 1 ing of the person remitting the money
 Thus the offiicted one would be mad
 whole. If I remember correctly, thi
 little woman pulled in something lik
 two hundred thousand dollars with he
 scheme. and, if she had really devote
 five minutes of thought each day t
 each of her subscribers the day woul
 have had to be about two months long