A MEAN SWINDLER.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 302, 21 December 1926, Page 13

A MEAN SWINDLER.

ROBBED T.B. SOLDIER. AXD SOLD HIS WIFE'S HOME. (From Our Chvn Correspondent.) SYDXEY, December IG. A particularly mean swindler was brought to book in Sydney this week, when detectives arrested him on several charges of obtaining money by false pretences. Coming from South Australia tlrree months ago, he made the acquaintance of a man and his wife, witii whom he took up residence. He told them he was a squatter in South Australia, and suggested that the husband, a returned Eoldier, in advanced tuberculosis, would get relief on his lidding, "Where the bracing air is sure to make a new man of you." They believed his story, and even went so far as to give him £300 —all they had in the world. This amount, he told them, he would repay when he got a bank draft from South Australia. But he disappeared at the end of three weeks. Police traced his movements, and found that Hie next obtained a suite of furniture from a city store on time payment, selling it immediately and pocketing the proceeds. A few weeks a<?o. a young Scottish girl immigrant, who, by dint of hard work, had got together a comfortable little home for her mother to come to. was introduced to the "station owner." -He paid court to her, and after a whirlwind courtship, they were married recently. When police arrested him they discovered that he had sold all the furniture she had bought prior to, meeting flint, nnd. in addition tn mining the man and wife from whom he "borrowed* £300. lias also left stranded the little Scotch girL - . ,