"EASY MONEY."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 235, 3 October 1936, Page 13

"EASY MONEY."

DANGERS OF LONDON. WAITING FOR COLONIALS. OLD CONFIDENCE TRICKS. (By NELLE M. SCANLAN.) The lure of easy money is not confined to any one class. Few people can resist the chance of getting rich quickly. But there is usually a catch in the scheme somewhere. Last week a young girl, whb inherited £200,000 when she came of age. appeared in court in the hope of salvaging some of the £32,000 she had been persuaded to invest in an aviation company, which was to make trips between London and Portugal. She had been misled by the rosy promises of a woman who was acting as scout of the company. This woman's job was to look out for women with money, get them interested, and win their support. There is a lot of this sort of thing going on in London. Retired clergymen are regular victims, and seldom a week passes without a clerical victim having recourse to law, often when it is too late. Company promoters are always on the lcok-out for guileless people, and most clergymen have little experience of finance or company business. Nice old ladies, with a fat bank balance, as well as those who have won a modest security after a life of hard work, are other "lambs" easily fleeced. Nice young men usually tackle the job of parting them from their money. A little lonely, they respond to the courteous flatteries that form the preliminary phase of these deals.

Waiting in the Strand. Before the bronze-faced men from the wide open spaces of the Empire arrive next year for the Coronation, Scotland Yard hopes to have rounded up most of the confidence tricksters, who lie in wait for them along the Strand. For it is on the Strand that most of the Dominion High Commissioners have their offices, and all good colonials pay a call there as soon as they come to town. Their sun-tanned faces, and often the very cut of their clothes, proclaim them, apart from the fact that they are to be caught coming out of some High Commissioner's office. It cannot be too often repeated, this warning against the promise of "easy money." It is very risky to make friends on a bus or in a restaurant or a hotel lounge, especially with someone who has a "good thing," People with "good things" aren't sharing them with a casual stranger. Yet every season we hear of men who have been duped, and parted from their hardearned money by a trick. Many of them are well-known tricks, and yet, year after year, the same old gang find new victims. Shrewd business men at home, the lure of quick profits ia too much for them. And many a man who has returned home much earlier than he was expected, with some trumped-up excuse, has been a victim, but he is too shamefaced to admit it. And knowing that it is worse than useless to try to track down these elusive swindlers, many victims keep silent. Bank Manager's Protection. I recall what a colonial bank manager who used to be in London told me. He said that he had an arrangement with his tellers, and whenever one of their clients wanted to draw out a large sum in notes the teller was to send him word quietly, and loiter over the counting to give him time. The manager would stroll out, greet the client enthusiastically, and invite him into his office. That was usually enough. The trickster, who usually accompanies his victim to the bank, and waits outside with a taxi at hand, seeing his "pigeon" led into the manager's office, would know that the game was up, and disappear. If the manager could not gain his client's confidence (and most of these swindles are carried out under pledge of secrecy), the fact that the confidence man had gone was enough to save his client's money —at least this time. To the confidence man, the bronzed face is a badge of money. Try a bleaching cream before you come next year, in case a few have slipped through Scotland Yard's fingers.