All “Brite & Fair”
Weeks later the trust officer was astonished to receive from an old personal friend, who was knocking about in the west, a circular of the Brite & Fair Bonanza Company, in which the big trust company was designated as “trustee” for the “B. & F.” stocks. As the friend who forwarded the circular knew something of the wildcat nature of the Brite & Fair enterprise, his comments on the folly of the bank’s accepting such a “trust” had an edge on them.
When the matter was investigated it was found that the whole plot had been carefully concocted and worked up; that the circulars had been printed and put in directed envelopes ready for mailing in advance of the placing of the so-called “trust,” and that when the trust officer of the solid financial institution had given his receipt for the “sealed package said to contain valuable papers,” a telegram had been sent by the “fiscal agent” to “mail out trustee circulars.” The man in this scheme, of course, believed that, as the circulars were being mailed out into a territory about a thousand miles from the city in which the banking and trust company was located, the trust officer who had been imposed upon would never hear of the misuse of his receipt for a “dummy” package which actually contained certificates of the mining company’s stock.
Why did the men who worked this scheme to steal the moral support of the big trust company go to so great pains to get it? Because fake investment operators have found it profitable to take every precaution to give the color of legality to their acts, they have found it profitable to hire shrewd legal pilots to tell them just how far they may go in a given direction without running upon the reefs of the United States postoffice’s “fraud order” or upon the rocks of a “conspiracy” prosecution.