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.