The Counterfeiters Caught with Pasted-Together Bills
A clever scheme involving glued-together fragments of old bank notes meets an end after a sharp-eyed Seattle policeman spots a boy making change.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
At last, the swindlers who have been reaping a rich harvest by passing worthless bills of the defunct New Brunswick Bank throughout the Puget Sound district are behind the bars. For a long time, detectives and United States secret service officers have been hot on the trail of two smooth swindlers who have been victimizing lodging house keepers and saloon men. Yesterday, a Seattle officer ran across a boy coming out of a lodging house on First Avenue South, on his way to get some change. The policeman, remembering the reports of bad money, questioned the boy and was told that two men had given the lodging house proprietor a bill for a room and were waiting for the change. Upon investigation, it was discovered the bill consisted of two of the old New Brunswick notes pasted together. The officer arrested the men, who answer the descriptions given by several victims in the city who had been defrauded in payment for board or at saloons.
“The officer told the lad that he thought he might be able to change it and went upstairs with him. The men were pointed out and he arrested them.”
Counterfeiting schemes have evolved from primitive 'cut and paste' jobs to high-tech digital fraud, but the core mechanism remains the same: exploiting the trust inherent in local commerce. Even today, Tacoma's small business owners remain the primary target for circulating bad currency, much as lodging house keepers were in 1904.
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