"PHANTOM FORGER"

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 118, 21 May 1938, Page 12

"PHANTOM FORGER"

TRAPPED AT LAST. POST OFFICE DEFRAUDED. CLEVER GIRL CLERK. (Special.—By Air Man.) LONDON", April 29. A tall, dark military-looking man walked into the St. John's Hill sub-post office, Wandsworth, London, and asked a young girl clerk if he could open a savings account. He gave his address as 11, Rose Avenue. Putney—and that put paid to the "Phantom Former." who for four year* had batiled the police and the post office, and on whose account the whole system of deposit entries has had to be altered. ~ - '« Th£ clerk; /Miss Rita Souter, aged 17, who lives in Ashlone Road, Putney, recognised the address as non-existent, and dialled the police. The hunt was up. And at the Old Bailey Noel Cameron, 32-years-old author, left the dock to serve three years' penal servitude for 'the greatest fraud in the history of the Post Office Savings Bank." No One Knew. It was revealed that while Miss Souter was on the 'phone a police car arrived in 30 seconds, and the occupants "listened-in" to her through Scotland \ard;'by the time she finished a detective was waiting in the post office. Dressed in a neat preen overall coat. Miss Souter spent the day as usual behind the counter of the little post office—selling stamps and postal orders, dispatching telegrams, weighing parcels, giving change. Not one in a hundred of the customers knew that it was she who had trapped the "Phantom Forger."' And her chief, the sub-postmaster, Mr. S. A. Marlow, shared her reticence. "Nothing very extraordinary about it,"' he told a reporter. '"We had received certain instructions, just as other post offices had. and we carried them out."' But Mrs. Percy Souter is rtelicrhted with her daughter. "Rita is a clever girl. She wants to get on in the post office work and she will,"' said Mrs. Souter. "She was. excited the evening she came home and told me how -she had helped to catch the man. but she's taken it very calmly ever since." Cameron, the "Phantom Forjrer"— known to the I\o. "No. 3S9W."—had been living for four years at the rate of £S a week, on the proceeds of 477 separate forgeries committed on the Savings Bank. Hi« method was not disclosed in Court, but it so affected the working of the hank that the system had to be revised. Well versed in the classics, Cameron, when he left prLs-on in 1034 after serving two months for forging telegrams, used his education at the Technical College of Art at Worcester to help him in crime. His impressive appearance—he was handsome, intellectual, and well mannered —was his stock-in-trade, and his seeming indifference when opening an account allayed any suspicion. 5/ Deposits, then It was while living in West Kensington that he hit on the idea of forcing deposit books. He started in a small way, depositing 0/ and drawing 18/. Thgn he moved to Leatherhead. Surrey, and nearly every day emerged armed with several savings hooks with which he descended on post offices in London or the Home Counties, withdrawing money from some, opening fresh accounts with a nominal 5/ deposit at others. In the course of his 477 forgeriesCameron visited almost every post office in London. He slowly amassed £1317. Always he put miles between his payments and withdrawals. He would open an account at one office. Then take a 4d bus ride to some district miles away to withdraw. The only thing the police knew about him was a description by many Post Office clerks—that he had a little scar under his lower lip. and that hio fingernails were unshapely. That description was in every -'poet office in London and the Home Counties, with the offer of a reward. But still the "Phantom Forger" carried on —nud wrote a book about cheque forgeries. To Leatherhead "Derek" Cameron was a mystery. No one knew who he was or what he did for a living. He spoke to very few people, did no entertaining, but > lived in a detached fiveroomed villa with an acre of ground on Hawks Hill, for which he paid about a year rent.