Читать книгу Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World - Clifton R. Wooldridge - Страница 43

A chain of stores in various cities for no other purpose than the obtaining of goods under false pretenses from wholesale merchants is the latest novelty in the swindling line. It has often been remarked that the originators of plans to dupe the public might coin their brains into cash without nearly the draft upon their originality that is called for by the devising of a swindling game. But the criminal instinct or incentive seems to lay its hold upon persons who might otherwise fill a leading and respected place in honorable avocations. The men who conceived the system of credit for goods to the value of many thousands of dollars, which they quickly disposed of in different cities by auction and attractive sales, closing up their stores and decamping when they had converted the credited stock into cash, were swindlers of unusual calibre.

The police of several cities now have the task of unearthing the frauds and bringing them to justice. They may or may not succeed in so doing, as the scheme was craftily laid and carried out. A harvest of $100,000 as the returns for a daring exploitation of the credit system will be regarded, even by the gilt-edged among the robbing fraternity, as a fine stroke of craftsmanship. The ingenuity of these cormorants calls for constant readjustment of honest persons to the conditions created. The lesson of the so-called bargain-house fraud will be conned, and for a long time to come it may be practically impossible for the same scheme to be worked again. But the feature of such enterprises is that they are designed only for the one operation. After that they become worthless to their originators.