GULLIBLE PEOPLE

Waikato Times, Volume 132, Issue 22093, 17 July 1943, Page 4

GULLIBLE PEOPLE

VALUELESS CHEQUES CASHED MAN SENT TO PRISON Commenting that he was amazed at the ease with which the prisoner had induced people to cash cheques, Mr W. H. Freeman, S.M., sentenced Harold Avery Clayton to 12 months’ imprisonment in the Magistrate’s Court, Te Awamutu, on Thursday. Accused, who is at present serving a sentence in the Waikeria Borstal Institution, pleaded guilty to four charges of false pretences. The first charge was of obtaining at Cambridge £5 from Andrew W. Anderson by means of a valueless cheque drawn on a bank at Rotorua, the second obtaining £5 from George Sidney Ardley, Auckland, under similar circumstances, the third, obtaining £lO from Arthur F. Bartley, Kerepeehi, and the fourth obtaining £lO by fraud from Henry W. Wotton, of Ohura.

Sergeant S. G. Clist, prosecuting, said Clayton had posed as a returned soldier from the Middle East, as a veterinary surgeon engaged curing dogs of distemper with a formula he had brought back from the East, and as a captain of the “Intelligence Corps” working in association with a magistrate at New Plymouth. The magistrate: “The hall-mark of respectability.”