FRAUDS BY OFFICE BOYS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 14465, 3 September 1910, Page 2 (Supplement)

FRAUDS BY OFFICE BOYS.

£200,000 IN STAMPS. STRANGE NEW YORK DISCOVERY. Amazing revelations are published to the effect that the State of New York has been robbed during the past yedr of £200,000 or thereabouts by office boys in Wall-street and the financial districts, employed by the brokers. It is the custom to place stamps on transfer stock, and the State Controller, Mr. Williams, who gives the details of the alleged wholesale thefts, declares that there has been a big conspiracy to defraud the State by means of using cancelled stamps after the defacements have been removed. Hundreds of boys in the financial offices he charges with having been a party to this conspiracy, and they have been assisted by dealers in cancelled stamps. It is not alleged that the heads of firms are in any way culpable, but the evidence secured shows that office boys in hundreds of cases regularly appropriated the money given to them to buy genuine transfer stamps and bought from illicit dealers cancelled stamps, which had done service at least once before. The boys confessed to the Controller that they had been making big profits. So far no prosecution has taken place, partly because reputable brokerage houses, it is alleged, dislike the notoriety of the legal proceedings. The men who sold the cancelled stamps are considered as the worst offenders, and steps are being taken to secure their punishment. Some of them, it is stated, kept assortments of cancelled stamps bearing the names of every brokerage house in Wall-street. Last year the amount of revenue raised by the stock of transfer stamp tax in the State of New York amounted to over £1,000,000, and but for the amounts stolen by the boys and the stamp dealers, it is believed that £1,200,000 would have been the minimum. The Controller admits that he has received most valuable help from brokers in revealing the frauds, ana he hopes, by means of fresh legislation, to make such frauds impossible in the future. Prosecutions will be difficult, he says, because the evidence comes exclusively from accomplices, whose statements in the present state of the law are inadmissible.