Evening Star Newspaper, May 4, 1930, Page 100

BY RUTH FINNEY. HIS is sometimes referred to as a cyni- cal age, yet two departments of the Federal Government in Washington spend most of their time saving peo- ple from the evil effects of too much faith. A sucker, says the dictionary, is a person Who is easily duped. Barnum observed that there is one born every minute. The Post Office Department has added to this study the information that a person who is once a sucker is almost certain to be always a sucker. The Post Office Department is one of the two that toil to keep overtrustful people from ehasing costly will-o‘-the-wisps. The other is the Federal Trade Commission, Both work on the principle that the only way to save the credulous is to keep temptation from them. The Post Office Department bars from the mail advertisements it finds to contain fraud. The Federal Trade Commission has power to order, advertisers who make deceptive or misleading statements to stop it. There is an amazing amount of this sort of thing going on. In a period of two years . the Post Office Department issued fraud orders . against 1,000 persons and concerns. The Fed- eral Trade Commission issued even more. ORACE J. DONNELLY, solicitor for the Post Office Department, who has studied the problem for years, says it is “that burning desire to get something for nothing” that leads folks to answer one ridiculous advertisement after another. One man satisfies this impulse by investing in the stock market; another by responding to advertisements that promise much for very little. “They close their eyes and invest,” says Don- nelly, “and then they awake and investigate, and to their sorrow find it is they who have gotten nothing for their something.” And, he finds, it is a dufficult matter to save such people from their own folly. “There is an old saying that a burnt child dreads the fire,” says Donnelly. “Seemingly that does not apply in the case of investors. In fact the unscrupulous promoter rather prefers burnt children to the uninitiated. He pays big money for their names and addresses. “Recently I examined a letter from a so- called sucker list seller in this country sent to certain fraudulent operators who had escaped to *Mexico, offering to sell several thousand names of clients of a defunct company. That concern had sold its clients millions of dollars of alleged securities of the same fraudulent character the fakers in Mexico were selling. “I also ran across a communication from another sucker list broker sent to these same escaped convicts in Mexico offering lists of in- A'stors in numerous other defunct concerns «<#iich had operated in different sections of the v g intry. “These sucker lists were made up separately of Americans, Italians, Germans, Poles and those of other nationalities with the nature of the investment in the case of each batch given. Investigation showed that a great many of these persons have been repeatedly victimized on pre- vious occasions. “Of course this fake investment bug gets just one of the numerous classes of suckers. There are others too numerous to mention who grab at anything that is sufficieitly misrepre- sented, and a lot of them come back for more. ' < e S e e = . e s v e THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, MAY 4, 1930. Since a Person Who Is Easily Duped Never Gets Over His Weakness, Two Depart- ments of Uncle Sam’s Government Are . Kept on the Job Protecting the Gullible From Skin Games and Frauds. “Those who fatten the” till of the medical faker are found to be constant repeaters. Some are pitiable cases where relief from a real dis- ease, such as cancer, is sought. Others involve less serious consequences. For instance, older men seeking youth and younger men looking for more youth literally jump from one rejuve- nation cure to the other until they cover the entire field. “Some fakers when brought to time have readily admitted the fraud, but offered as an excuse the fact that some other charlatan in his line would catch the sucker, so why not he!” . It is futile to try to check charlatans by put- ting them in jail, Donnelly believes, for when the Government tried it, one convicted pro- moter, upon arriving at the prison, took the keeper into partnership with him, and resumed operations on a large scale, from within the prison walls. So the department now takes the more drastic step of preventing the fraudu- lent promoter from receiving any mail, THER! is a diverting variety to the schemes used to separate the suckers from their simoleons. A Texas woman bunco artist joined two or three matrimonial clubs and began writing let- ters to male members. She was lonely, pretty, and 19, shé wrote. A Post Office inspector found her to be about 30 and very homely, She promised numerous men who were also lonely to marry them, and then she began ask- ing them for money, : If the victim pressed for marriage, she pleaded that she was ill, or that her mother was ill. To one man who probably had become annoyingly ardent she wrote that she had tu- berculosis, was about to be operated on for appendicitis and would have to have her ton- sils taken out. She had built up quite a flour- ishing business when the Post Office Depart- ment heard of her. A warning was not ob- served, and finally a fraud order was issued, closing the mail to all her letters. DOWN in Atlanta, Ga., a man and his wife and daughter organized the “Electrifiable Co.” and started a mail-order business offering to sell for $5 a pair wonderful so-called heel plates. ¥ The heel plates, according to the Electrifi~ ables, would cure hardening of the arteries, high and low blood pressure, enlargement of the heart, kidney trouble, hardening of the pros- tate gland, diabetes, rheumatism and dropsy. All these diseases, it was explained, were caused by uric acid in the blood stream and body, and could be cured by producing a cer- tain electrical effect within the body. The “plate” caused the blood of the wearer to be heated about two degrees, the explanation'con- tinued, thus dissolving and eliminating the uric acid. ‘. Post Office inspectors found that the “plates” were crudely cut out by an Atlanta tinner, with ordinary shears, from sheets of copper and zinc. They could be bought for a few cents each. The $5 price was almost all profit. = . MOR! ambitious still was the enterprise of one Joseph P. Serada of Chicago, who did business under the name of Health Violet Rare and fortunate the man or woman who does not suffer from at least one of the ailments he proposed to cure. The whole world was to be his clientele. He said he would rid cus- tomers of: Abcess, alcohol and drug addiction, asthma, ataxia, barber’s itch, birthmarks, bladder disease, boils, blackheads, brain fag, Bright's disease, bronchitis, bruises, bunions, burns, cal- luses or corns, cancers, cankers, carbuncles, cataract, catarrh, chafe, chapped hand, chil- blains, cold extremities, colds, constipation, dandruff, deafness, earache, diabetes, diph- theria, dyspepsia, eczema, epilepsy, falling hair, felons, female troubles, fistula, freckles, frost bite, hay fever, headache, heart disease, hives, goiter, gout, gray hair, grippe, insomnia, leucor= rhea, lumbago, mumps, nervousness, neuralgia, neuritis, obesity, paralysis, piles, pimples, pleurisy, pneumonia, poison ivy, prostatic dis- eases, pyorrhea, red nose, rheumatism, ring- worm, scarlet fever, scars, skin disease, small- pox, sore feet, stone bruises, sore throat, sprains, stiff neck, tonsilitis, ulcer, whooping cough and writer’s cramp. : All these could be cured by his “violet ray machine,” Serada claimed, and the regular price of $35 would be reduced for a limited time only to $15. The machine was to be plugged into ordinary house electric current and applied to the human body, whereupon it would quickly cure pain and disease. BU’I‘ the Federal Trade Commission investi- gated and found: That Serada had copied his list of diseases from a circular some one else had used previ- That he knew nothing about the curative value of either the machine or its rays.. - That the machine when plugged in made a violet color, but no violet ray, and it furnished the same kind of mild stimulation to the body that turpentine or red pepper ointment would furnish, but no curative effect whatever. wihe commission put a stop to Health Violet advertisements. Once a Sucker — —Always a Sucker The University of Applied Science, also doing business in Chicago, incurred the displeasure of the Government in the course of giving ine struction in fingerprinting and secret service intelligence for amateur Sherlocks. But all its representatives found when they visited the University of Applied Science was a large filing cabinet filled with fingerprints of anonymous persons, most of them dead. - Pupils, when they happened to be in CI were allowed to look through this cabinet. They paid $70 for the privilege, together with 54 lessons and a fingerprint outfit. The university claimed the regular price was $100, and to the pretended reduction in rates the com= mission also objected. LORIDA and California are magic words on the pens of promoters out for the bigger fellows in the game. When the land boom was on in Florida fous years ago the mails were full of flowery litera= ture and beautiful faked pictures designed to lure the unwary. : This is the way it was.done by one concern, The Florida Lioyds Organization, otherwise known as International Lloyds Agencies, Ltd. It secured an option on 5,500 acres of lahd and, without surveying, put agents to work selling lots. The option was never taken up, though a great number of lots were sold. When the concern found itself without land it did not attempt to refund purchase money, but took up some more land, moved over a portable sign bearing the name “Lloydsdale,” and lured more purchasers. f Again the options expired, and this time the company bought some 300 acres at $18 an acre, teached only by a winding trail 15 miles through the woods. Again the sign “Lloydsdale” was moved. Only investigation by the Post Office Department put a stop to the perambulating project. EVERAL years ago a silk stocking company devised the “endless chain” method of doing business through the mail, and hundreds of other concerns followed its lead. Golf balls and lingerie and Italian villas were offered by mail. Before the purchaser’s eyes were dangled the hope that he would get some $10 worth of merchandise for $1. He had to hazard $4 to get coupons, and he thought he had a chance of winning a prize by bringing in other ‘people. 4 f The Post Office Department figured out that before an adventurer, even up to the fifteenth link in the chain, could win the $10 prize, addi- tional investors to the number of 1,549,681,956, which is close to the total population of the earth, would have to advance the stupendous sum of $4,649,045,868. 3 But there seems to be no end to the scheme: and the schemers, just as there is no end to the lambs waiting to be shorn. Dr. 8. J. Eagan, who apparently never exe isted in the flesh at all, was advertised to women as the maker of “magic gloves,” which, if worn for one night, would beautify, soften, whiten and make smooth the hands, removing all freckles and discolorations. The Federal Trade Commission just could not believe this, and tried the gloves out. It ‘ound that they did nothing of the kind. Neither did “Pacial Film,” or “Neoplasma,” said to be worth $5,000 a pound, make any and all faces beautiful overnight. (Copyright, 1930.)