It’s not clear who invented the “We’ve got a package waiting for you” scam. But one early proponent was a cherubic 15-year-old legal clerk known to us only as George.
The year was, say, 1854. Franklin Pierce was in the White House, and the country was less than a decade away from a fratricidal war.
George, who lived in New York, had a problem. The curly haired youth charmed everyone, and he could already draft a legal document. He needed money, though, and there weren’t many ways to get it.
But there was an answer at hand: The Law Register, a directory of every attorney in the United States. Just as Dunhill would do 100 years later, George used the volume to compile a mailing list. He checked off the names of rural lawyers, and those who had no business with his firm, carefully suppressing all other names. Then he copied them onto a master file.
To this list he sent neatly written copies of the following letter:
“Sir: I have received a package of papers for you from Liverpool, England, with six shillings charges thereon — on receipt of which amount the parcel will be sent to you by such conveyance as you may direct. Yours, respectfully, William H. Jolliet.”
Of course, there was no such package.
Some lawyers saw right through the ruse, and one wrote back asking the following questions:
-
Who are you?
-
Who knows you?
-
Who do you know?
-
Is “Wm. H. Jolliet” the name given you in baptism?
-
Wouldn’t you receive less than six shillings, if you could get it?
-
Do you think you have taken me in?
-
After reading the above, please inform me whether you remain Jolly yet.
But others apparently paid without thinking about it, possibly believing that a rich relative in England had died and left them money (the logic behind the scam). And George gave no sign that he had drifted away not only from studying the law, but also from obeying it.
But the law was on to him. One night, after picking up cash-filled envelopes at the Brooklyn post office, George was accosted by postal inspectors, who had been advised by the Brooklyn postmaster that there might be a fraud going on.
The youth was prepared with a story. He told the agents that he worked as a part-timer for “Jolliet,” whom he met only in public places, and that he would be happy to cooperate. “I am a student in a respectable law-office in New York, and would not like to be involved in any trouble of this sort,” George said.
The next day, as if to prove his good faith, he signed an affidavit and provided the inspectors with a copy of the mailing list. But that proved to be his undoing.
Senior inspector J. Holbrook, on whose account this piece is based, visited George’s firm and compared the names on the list against those checked off in the Law Register. They were identical.
Confronted with this coincidence, George confessed and narrowly avoided a perjury charge (the loophole was that the commissioner forgot to administer the oath when George signed the affidavit). Holbrook hoped that “the rare talents which he possesses, will be yet be found arry’d on the side of honesty and virtue.”
It is not known whether they were. But as we now know, he could have said the same thing of the medium used by George.
Network
