TRICKS WITH MONEY

Greymouth Evening Star, 27 April 1937, Page 9

TRICKS WITH MONEY

NEW KIND OF SMUGGLING. LONDON, March 21. Though the smuggling of marks out of Germany is regarded by the German Government as a crime worse than treason, many people still attempt to save the greater part of their capital by smuggling it abroad. r Phe reason for this is clear. People who emigrate from Germany because the present Government makes their existence, there more and 1 more difficult: lose nearly lit) per cent of their money if they emigrate in a legal way.

A mail who has a capital of, say. E2U.OU0 —a fortune in Germany—has to pay it quarter of his capital as a special emigration tax. This leaves him £15.000, which must be paid into what is called a. “blocked accou'nt" in Germany.

He is then allowed to sell this account. to a foreign bank —but the quota for blocked marks is at present IS per cent., so that he receives C 2700, instead of £20,000. It is, therefore, not. difficult to understand that many hundreds of thousand marks arc smuggled every day. Though letters are opened, telephone lines tapped,' spies are everywhere, and every bank clerk is bound to report, any considerable withdrawal from an account, still most of the smugglers get. away with I heir money without being detected. 'l’liey employ ingenious methods.

There was. for instance, a man who put an advertisement for a typist in tlio Volkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi newspaper. Then he addressed about a hundred letters to his own box number, all written in a different hand, posted from different parts of the country. Every loiter contained a 100 mark note. Then ho went away, from Prague ho wrote a. letter to the advertisement manager of the Volkischer Beobachter, stating that he was away on a business trip, and asking for all the answers to his advertisement to be

posted io his hotel in Prague. Tiie advertisement manager put ail

the letters into an envelope and sent it to Prague. The Secret Police did not open a letter from the official newspaper, and so the man in Prague received one morning an envelope containing bis money, smuggled out of the country by the Government newspaper. A second case was' more complicated. Two real and two imaginary persons played a. part in it —say Airs Smith, her son Mr Smith, Mr Jones, and Mr Brown.

Mr Smith, a German refugee, lives in London, while his mother is still iu Germany. One day he writes a letter to Mr Brown, c/o Mrs Smith, in Germany. The letter runs: “Dear Brown, 1 am sorry to hear of your troubles and enclose 500 marks, which will possibly be of some help to you. On the envelope the name of a Mr Jones at Mr Smith's address appears as sender. The envelope is not stuck down properly. Mrs Smith, in Germany, receives Iho letter one morning, opens the envelope, puts 500 marks in it, and when the postman comes along that afternoon she tells him that there is no Mr Brown living at her address, and that the letter should go back to the sender.

As it is a letter from abroad to be returned to a foreign country the police do not open it. Mr Smith in London gets his letter returned —but this time it contains 500 marks. Mr Smith made only one mistake — ho. did this trick so often that the police in Germany became suspicious about the many letters to the untraceable Mr Brown, and opened them. But even then, when they discovered the money in them, they could do no moie than pay the amount into a blocked account in favour of Mr Jones, of London. The money was lost, as Mr Smith could not make any efforts to recover it, but before he was found out he had smuggled several thousand marks out of Germany.

Professional smugglers work on a much bigger scale. They have secret ways of crossing frontiers, and carry large sums with them. They' are so well organised that they can undertake to insure their customers against loss or seizure of the money.

rim- favourite district of these mugglers is the Rhineland, with its long frontiers to Holland and Belgium. As there are many houses where, for instance, the garden is in Belgium and the house is in Germany, it does not require much skill to smuggle money from Germany into another country.

There are firms in all parts of Europe acting as receivers for all ths international mark smugglers, and they do an enormous trade. Mark smuggling has developed into an international racket, which has assumed gigantic proportions, and can be compared with the American bootlegging rackets.