The Evergreen 'Green Goods' Scam
A classic confidence trick that lures victims with the promise of counterfeit money.
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.
Green goods men are sending out a great many of their circulars to this part of the country just now. It is the same old scheme: a letter in typewriting, unfolding the great bargains in the 'goods' offered and warning the intending purchaser not to write, but to communicate by means of a mysteriously worded telegram, a copy of which is enclosed. A clipping from some newspaper purports to tell how a counterfeiter escaped conviction because his goods were so like the genuine that the treasury agents could not swear they were counterfeits; this is the bait used to catch the unwary sucker. Hardly a week passes that the Post-Intelligencer does not receive one or more of these letters from some subscriber who has received it. There are some, however, who do not read the papers, and it is this class that go to New York to meet the dealer in green goods and give up $400 or more in return for a package of brown paper or a box of sawdust. It does no good to expose this ancient swindle, because the men who would be trapped never read the papers.
“It is the same old scheme... give up $400 or more in return for a package of brown paper or a box of sawdust.”
The 'Green Goods' scam—a 19th-century precursor to modern phishing and advance-fee fraud—demonstrates how the lure of 'easy money' remains a potent psychological hook. The paper's frustration with the gullibility of the 'unwary sucker' echoes contemporary warnings about digital scams that target the elderly or the isolated.
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