The $40 Forgery That Fooled Seattle’s Hardware Elite
A dashing stranger with a dark mustache and bare chest walks into W.P. Boyd & Co., flashes a forged check from the Seattle Hardware Company, and vanishes with $40 in cash—leaving behind only a single typo that saves the victim from total ruin.
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.
It leaked out yesterday that the rapid young man who defrauded Portland merchants by means of forged checks and the 'know me unchange' racket early last week also took in a $40 trick in this city. On Monday, February 4, Andrew Young, the book-keeper for W.P. Boyd & Co., the dealers in furnishing goods, had his head buried deep in his ledger, when suddenly calculations were rudely disturbed by a medium-sized butte [man] with dark mustache, and aged about 25 years, poking his head through the window of the office. As he did so Mr. Young noticed that a roller was in his shirt sleeve and he was bare-headed.
The young man said briskly, as he laid down a check for $40 on the counter: 'I'm from the Seattle Hardware Company. A customer waiting for change, which we are out of. Would you be kind enough to change this $40 check for me?'
'Certainly,' said Mr. Young as he glanced at the check to assure himself that it was all right. Then he passed out the $40 in coin to the costless [costly?] young man, who hurriedly thanked him and left the store.
Mr. Young thought nothing more of the matter till Wednesday, when he presented the check to the First National bank, where it was pronounced a forgery. So Mr. Young is out just $40.
The check was drawn on the First National bank of Seattle, and made payable to W.P. Boyd & Co., or bearer, by the Seattle Hardware Co. The number and the stencil of the Seattle Hardware Co. were counterfeited in good shape. The only fault was that the 'i' in 'Seattle' was made with a capital 'I'. Beyond this error it was a perfect duplicate of the stencil used by the company. Since that time the same trick was successfully played in Portland on two or three merchants there. The trick by which Mr. Young was victimized is an old one, but one by which even the most wary might be deceived.
This 1906 tale of corporate impersonation feels remarkably modern, echoing today's phishing scams and social engineering frauds where trust in brand names is weaponized against employees. The perpetrator’s reliance on a minor typographical error—a lowercase 'i' versus an uppercase 'I'—highlights how easily human attention can be bypassed by authority and urgency, a vulnerability that persists in digital banking and corporate finance today.
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