Now Here’s Something You Don’t See Anymore

Here are some excerpts from a 3-page let­ter that came in the snail mail on Sat­ur­day for my deceased mother-in-law:

Dear Friend:
My name is Dick Holl­man. In Sep­tem­ber 1991 my car was repos­sessed. Bill col­lec­tors were hound­ing me like crazy. I was laid off and unem­ploy­ment ran out. In Octo­ber I received a let­ter telling me how I could earn $800,000.00 any­time I wanted to!!! Of course I was skep­ti­cal, but because I was so des­per­ate, and had noth­ing to lose I gave it a try. In Jan­u­ary 1992, my fam­ily went on a ten day cruise and in Feb­ru­ary, bought an Escalade with cash. This pro­gram works per­fectly as long as every­body is hon­est and enjoy not work­ing again!!! THIS IS NOT A CHAIN LETTER!!! This is a per­fectly legal money mak­ing oppor­tu­nity. Please read the let­ter care­fully, fol­low the instruc­tions EXACTLY!!!!!

Who­ever sent this for­got to advance the dates by a decade when they changed the vehi­cle pur­chased, Escalades weren’t man­u­fac­tured until 1999.

1. Imme­di­ately send $1.00 US funds to each of the 6 names on this page.
Include with you dol­lar a request to be put on their mail­ing list. THIS IS THE CRITICAL STEP THAT MAKES THIS PROGRAM PERFECTLY LEGAL!!!!!

Bold­ing mine, doesn’t just putting this instruc­tion in the let­ter inval­i­date this loophole?

4. Pur­chase a mail­ing list from DATA LINE, THEIR NUMBER IS 1800–497-2912. Ask for a list of oppor­tu­nity seek­ers. This list is $40.00 and comes on address labels ready to go on envelopes. They will ship C.O.D. and take Mas­ter Card and Visa.

Inter­net search­ing reveals no com­pany called DATA LINE that sells mail­ing lists. I also got no hits using a cou­ple of toll free reverse look up direc­to­ries for that num­ber (I was scared to actu­ally call it…) So this is prob­a­bly not a way to scam peo­ple out of $40.

1)Steven Clewis
5453 Stew­art Dr.
Vir­ginia Beach, VA. 23464
…
6)Richard Creamer
Rt. 1 Box 2025
Ray City, GA.31645

The address label, a lick to apply kind, listed Mr. Creamer and that address. So, did Richard actu­ally fol­low the writ­ten instruc­tions in hopes of get­ting $800,000? Or did Steven Clewis have the return address labels printed up along with the

3. Copy or print 200 (or 500 if you are ambi­tious) copies of this 3 page letter.

in hopes of speed­ing up the income? As far as I can tell from my rudi­men­tary inter­net searches, no one by the name of Steven Clewis lives at that address. There were 4 dif­fer­ent names with 4 cor­re­spond­ing, but dif­fer­ent, phone num­bers that I could find listed at 5453 Stew­art Dr.

Any­way, who­ever hoped to profit from this “solic­i­ta­tion to join their mail­ing list” is going to be at least one buck shy of their goal as the let­ter went into our shred­der. Right after I scanned it, so I wouldn’t have to retype these excerpts.