ROGUES AND FRAUDS

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 48, 20 November 1928, Page 9

ROGUES AND FRAUDS

LIVING ON LETTERWRITING FOUR-FIGURE INCOMES

That Ls.dy Houston should have received thousands of begging letters since her husband left her a fortune of several millions is not surprising. The late Lord Kothsehild had to employ a special secretary to deal exclusively with appeals made to him through the post. It is not suggested that all these appeals are bogus, says a London writer, Mr. Charles Kingston, but it may be taken for granted that the vast majority are, for the genuine poor and unfortunate have usually’ a pride of their own which makes them anxious to conceal their distress rather than broadcast it. To illustrate this, there is the story of a member of that well-known family of millionaires, the Wills, who was the recipient of 5000 begging letters within a week of the amount of his inheritance being disclosed. He selected fifty and sent bls solicitors a large sum to be divided among the writers. Three weeks later the money was returned to him intact, with the intimation that all the cases had been investigated and found to be fraudulent. But it is not the ordinary beggingletter writer that is now dealt with.

There are a number of well-educated men and women who can and do make an income which many professional men would envy by studying intended victims with almost microscopical care, and composing their appeals in language both moving and convincing. Over a Thousand a Year. A few years ago there died in a common lodging-house in London a beg-ging-letter writer known to the police as George Stevenson, who, when in his zenith, boasted that he made over a thousand a year by writing begging letters. Stevenson was educated at a wellknown public school and at Oxford, but at 35 he was a penniless wanderer in London. One night, when shuffling along the Embankment, he found a piece of blank paper. Having a pencil in his pocket, he wrote on the spur of the moment an appeal for help to the father of one of the pupils at the preparatory school at which he had been a master. It was simply a direct request for a loan of a pound, but it was the postscript, which stated that he would have to post the letter without a stamp because of his penniless condition, which brought ten pounds by return. During the luxurious dinner with which he celebrated his good fortune, Stevenson realised he had found his vocation. The man was something of a genius. Any other person in his position would have specialised in begging letters to the relatives of schoolfellows, university friends, and pupils, but Stevenson guessed at once that this would only give publicity to the fact that ho had boon kicked out of his profession through his own fault, and was, therefore, not entitled to sympathy. A Dozen Aliases. Stevenson preferred to trade on the fads and weaknesses of certain wealthy persons whom he knew, and his first move was to create for himself a dozen aliases and personalities. His methods can be explained by a single example. Among his pupils at a certain fashionable preparatory school had been a boy who had casually mentioned to him that he had a wealthy aunt whose husband had suffered several business losses liecause he had left the Methodists for the Church of England. Stevenson now wrote the woman a long letter, in the course of which lie stated that, until the previous month, he had been headmaster of a Methodist school at a large salary. • Having, however, conscientiously decided he could no longer subscribe to the tenets of the Methodists, and being desirous of joining the Church of England, he had resigned his appointment, with the result that he was now penniless. Could the lady he was addressing help him to obtain employment? Did she know of anyone who would assist him to start a school of his own? This is a bare outline of a very long and convincing letter. That it was “convincing” is proved by the fact that the old lady actually sent him a cheque for £lOO. Downfall of Stevenson. Year after year Stevenson earned a four-figure income, and he must have rung the changes on at least fifty characters. His downfall came about in a peculiar way. Having heard of a wealthy old lady who suffered from the delusion that she knew how to cure cancer, he wrote her a long and pitiable story of a wife who was dying of that dread disease. Knowing that she would be sure to call and see the patient lie arranged with a woman to play Hie role of the sick wife for a fee of £lO. Everything was ready when the lady arrived at the squalid tenement in Camberwell, and Stevenson, suitably dressed as a broken-down gentleman, conducted her with befitting solemnity into the room. The visitor was completely deceived, and before she was escorted downstairs by the impostor she opened her purse and handed several notes to the pale woman in bed. After she had driven away, Stevenson rushed upstairs to secure Hie money, but, to his pained astonishment, his confederate insisted that it had been given to her, and that it was not part of their bargain that she should hand it over. Stevenson argued until he discovered that the amount was actually a hundred pounds. Then he turned to threats, finally losing his head and complaining to the policeman on duty that she had robbed him. After that, further concealment was impossible. The fraud was laid bare, with the result that both got a term of imprisonment. This seemed to smash Stevenson's nerve, for he rapidly went downhill after his release, ami died in abject poverty. How a Woman was “Touched.” Tiie begging-letter writer can be unconsciously humorous at times. Two years before the war it peeress living in Berkeley Square received the following letter in the handwriting of a child. It greatly touched her, as she was the mother of a family of youngsters :— “Dere ladey all last night mother was crying because wo ehildrin hadn't had anything to eat all day she thought i was asleep and couldn't here her and she doesn't know I’m writing dere ladey I'm only seven but I don't want mother to cry all night.” The fastest motor-ear belonging to her ladyship conveyed her at once to a cottage beyond Leyton, only for her to discover Hint Hie writer of the letter was a fat Prussian in the early thir-

ties who had left Germany to avoid serving in the army! One kindly philanthropist received a sharp lesson a few years ago. Touched by a circumstantial account of a dying child and a starving mother, he sent a cheque for five pounds, and doubtless recorded it among his good deeds until an Old Bailey trial revealed that he had been the victim of a clever gang of forgers. This gang had adopted the trick of writing begging letters to men and w'omen known to be rich and charitable. Whenever a cheque was received they used it as a basis for forgery on wholesale lines. Occasionally they were defeated by bank-notes being sent instead of a cheque, but they had a long run with other people's money before the inevitable mistake led to their downfall.