CONFIDENCE TRICKS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3451, 29 November 1932, Page 2

CONFIDENCE TRICKS

SALE OF BUSINESS. MANY DUPES IN SYDNEY. For more than a year the Sydney police have been on the track of con-fidence-trick people, who have been selling small businesses to people who have still a little to invest and desire to get a living. During the last few months, says a correspondent, the police have secured fully a hundred of these tracksters, who pose as business agents with small businesses for sale. Shops in most suburbs can be secured for almost nothing, and these are rented by sharpers and the confidence men enter into a conspiracy with dummy occupiers, dummy stocks and dummy books showing just sufficient profit at the end of the week to make the business a comfortable one for a newcomer who wants a competence and a little bit over. A few weeks or even a day of business proves plain that the purchaser has been defrauded. The profit of £lO a week generally dwindled to a loss of 10s, and possibly bankruptcy if the rent is not paid on time. The wonder is not that there are so many people in Sydney who are ready to believe all that is told them, but that there are so many hundreds who can make a handsome living out of fraudulence. As fast as one hundred of them arrives at the gaol gate, another hundred saunters out in search of the dupes that are left.