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Begging Letter
Fraud
Handwritten letters, e-mails, or Internet postings ask for donations for
personal causes. Some of the phony causes involve sick children, animal
cruelty, disaster victims, religious missions, and other down-on-our-luck
stories.
 This
excerpt is from comedian-violinist Jack Benny’s autobiography:
“Some people
know I’m not a miser. These are the professional confidence men who
specialize in begging letters. We had some seventy-five letters a month
from such characters. I remember
one from a party who described himself as a farmer. His wife helped out
with their little farming enterprise in Iowa. They asked me for a loan of
$50,000 with which to buy tractors - a lot of tractors. They wanted me to
mechanize their farm. To prove they were using the money for a legitimate
purpose, the farmer proposed sending me pictures of the tractors.
Meanwhile, he enclosed snapshots of himself and his wife in
 dungarees
plus several sad pictures of the old-fashioned and sickly-looking horses
which were all they had to pull their plows and harrows and threshers.
I mentioned this letter to [comedian] George Burns. And, would
you believe it, he had received the same letter from the same couple with
the same pictures of the tired horses?
I asked him, “What do you think we ought to do about this?”
“Well, they seem like a
nice couple.”
“Yes, and agriculture is the backbone of our country.”
“And not only that, Jack, but it’s the farmers like these who
are helping to feed the starving millions in underdeveloped countries, so
I think as long as they are willing to send us pictures of the tractors,
we should send them pictures of two checks, one from me and one from you,
each for $50,000.””
Jack Benny and Joan Benny, Sunday Nights at
Seven: The Jack Benny Story, Warner Books, 1990.
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