Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 September 1878 — Be Careful What You Put Your Name To. [ARTICLE]

Be Careful What You Put Your Name To.

The Davenport Democrat timely observes that “the season has now come when the insinuating agent and patentrights man visits small towns and country villages, seeking to trap the unwary by tricks that have become so common that they ought no longer to find a victim. The swindling is almost invariably done by—on some pretext—inducing the farmer or country merchant to put his name on paper. One of the most successful, and the easiest, ways to obtain the customer’s signature is what purports to be a receipt. It is, in fact, a receipt printed, and containing a multitiplicity of words. It is on a slip of paper seven or eight inches long. The place of the signature is naturally in the right-hand corner. The customer has bought something of the smooth-spoken agent, and, honestly enough, is perfectly willing to sign a receipt. Let that paper be cut in two, up and down the center, and the right-hand half will be an unobjectionable thirty or sixty-day promissory note. The signature is well known in the neighborhood; it is sold or traded long before maturity to some bona fide and innocent purchaser, and the unsophisticated maker has no legal defense. Or, possibly, a fence-wire agent comes along with a sample coil of wire. The customer wants a few rods of wire fence, and signs an agreement to pay on delivery 4 cents per foot for five coils of wire. When delivered, it appears that the coils each contain a quarter of a mile of wire. By the same trick the festive lightning-agent sells the victim enough of lightning-rod to thatch the roof of the house with, when only thirty feet were, needed. The safe way is not to transact business with an itinerant agent unless he can get along without your signature to a written or printed instrument.