Prevalence of Fraud

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 1, 1903

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 29, No. 13.

Prevalence of Fraud.

The large number of frauds reported by the daily press during the past few weeks has been a source of astonishment to the general reader. They do not seem to be restricted to one line of business or to one class of individuals. It is a striking sign of these times in which we live, showing the great prevalence of the desire for riches without regard to the manner in which they are obtained. There has been a run on the imperial bank of Shanghai due to the circulation of forged or fraudulent bank notes to the amount of $300,000. The president of a mining company at Los Angeles, Cal., is made defendant in a suit to recover damages for the fraudulent sale of stock of the company. The vice-president and manager of the Bank of South Pennsylvania is arrested, charged with numerous fraudulent transactions. The bank was closed by the examiner. A great many insurance frauds also have been reported, in some of which murder has been resorted to for the purpose of securing the insurance money. A million-dollar insurance fraud is now under investigation in the city of Pittsburg, Penn. A company has been operating in Mexico, defrauding the insurance companies of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even our Post-office Department at Washington has been smirched by this greed for gold on the part of some of its employees, who have, through a kind of blackmail, exacted money from fraudulent concerns before permitting their matter to go through the mails; and other concerns have been excluded because of refusal to pay. The Scripture statement that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” was never more strikingly verified than it is being verified in these days. No crimes are too dark or cruel to deter men and women from committing them, if money is the object involved.