INGENIOUS SWINDLE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 164, 14 July 1933, Page 10

INGENIOUS SWINDLE

•‘BARGAINS” FOR HOUSEWIVES ASHAMED TO TELL FRIENDS An organised gang of ingenious door swindlers who had set out to net hundreds of pounds by duping housewives anxious to strike bangains recently descended on Yorkshire and the Midlands. With most of their victims among the well-to-do and professional classes, the business trick proved highly profitable. The price asked and the value stated depended, of course, on the 'customer who was taken in hand. The swindler called at a house in the garb of a sailor and offered for sale “genuine Persian carpets” and “Russian bearskins.” He claimed that the articles are really worth £lOO or more, but ‘‘confessed ’ ’ frankly that they w’ere smuggled goods. “You see. I am down on my luck, and I’m willing to take £lO for them,” he said. To make a highly-coloured story even more plausible, the sailor sometimes gave his carpets a shake, and a sprinkle of sand fell out. “They haven’t been unpacked since they were shipped from Persia,” he informed the buyer. Actually, the sailor had sprinkled the sand on the precious Persian carpets himself. But these “Oriental” rugs and mats had only come cheap from as far East as Czechoslovakia, where they are turned out in thousands. The Russian bearskins ‘‘smuggled out of Russia” and offered at a “give-away price” are .just goatskins. Though scores of housewives have succumbed to this new front-duor swindle, very few have had the courage to go to the police and complain. They, naturally, arc loath to admit that they have been swindled while trying to buy “smuggled” goods at ten or twenty per cent of their value. Not a.any, even, like to w’arn their friends. a result the swindling gaifg have oeen having a very successful northern tour at about 200 per rent profit.