DEATH REVEALS FRAUDS.

Western Star, 5 July 1921, Page 4

DEATH REVEALS FRAUDS.

DEFICIT OF-£70,000.

Investigations into the career of Case Hopper Wrightson, ' a Scarborough house agent, auctioneer, and stockbroker, reveal a long career of forgery and fraud. The man died after being terribly burned in an empty house, of which he was an agent, and the circumstances of his death are still a mystery. Assets of £3,899 and an estimated deficiency of 170,940 were shown in a statement of his affahfc which was submitted to the first meeting of his creditors, fifty-six of whom filed proofs for over £70,000 before the meeting.. Mr Maekay, official receiver, said lie had never known a case so serious and so sad,

Commencing at Scarborough fifteen years ago in a-comparatively small way, Wrightson increased his operations, and the turnover at hie two principal banks in 1913 was £10,400, and in 1920 it increased to £78,855. So far as could be ascertained, that

turnover had been largely in the nature of illicit transactions'. His whole career, from almost the very start, appeared to have been one of fraud. _ | The extraordinary part of it! wajs that the transactions had been carried on through all those years, without detection, for some of the frauds were of an extraordinary

stupid and silly nature. 7* Mr Mackay produced two mortgaged deeds, the signatures on which were forgeries. A rubber stamp had l been used to stamp the deeds as if they had been registered at Northallerton, and the .signature of the registrar was a forgery. The deedp hadi been written by Wriglitson himself, and were .not. couched in legal phraseology. Yet for fifteen years they had remained undetected, though any lawyer would have seen at once that they were an absolute fraud. j In another case Wrightßon purported to give a lady the deeds of some property on which she advanced £I,OOO for mortgage. She deposited the supposed deeds in a tin box at her bankers, and since his dieath the box had been found to contain merely a bundle of blank papers and a certain. novel, whioh he thought was actually written by the lady herself. Some shocking cases of Wrightson’s dealings with money entrusted to him by clients for investment hadl come to light. Some had lost every penny they put into his hands. In one case, where £7,000 was entrusted to him to invest, he put every penny into' his own pocket. Some of the money he invested in his. own name, some in fictitious names, and in many cases the money was never invested at all. j

He flasKed papers in the faces of his customers, pretending they were the papers for investments. When pressed further for money he appeared in many cases to have forged the names of people whose securities he held.

Ho had kept up the fraud by regularly paying interest and dividends ip cash, and the extraordinary thing was that people had not wanted to see their dividend warrants. As the years went on he had bad to .go further and further into crime to pay these dividends. >