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Catch Me If You Can
The Straits Times
|July 15, 2025
In a Liverpool court in August 1936, a "smartly dressed" man by the name of Herbert Powell stood accused of a series of false pretences committed across England.
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He was sentenced to three years in jail.
Among his many ruses, the 39-year-old Londoner posed as the "travelling editor" of The Straits Times in an attempt to borrow money from a Liverpool-based director of a rubber company in the Straits Settlement.
"Please do appreciate how bitterly humiliating it is for me to have to write such a letter as this," Powell had written to the director under the name of his fictitious editor, Vernon Stanton.
The director was not fooled, and the law soon caught up with Powell, a bankrupt father of two with past convictions for stealing typewriters and forging cheques. The police also asked the court to consider 28 other offences, including one for assaulting a woman.
"He is, in the eyes of the police, a very plausible and clever swindler, and an imposter of the worst type," declared Inspector T. Sullivan, as reported in The Straits Times.
This story is from the July 15, 2025 edition of The Straits Times.
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