If you are one of the several hundred people who gave a subscription agent $2.50 for 10 years subscription to the Progressive Farmer, it is no news to you that you have not gotten the paper, but it will be news that the agent is now in the Union county jail awaiting trial at the coming term of the Superior court for false pretense and possibly other charges.
The agent is M.H. Moody and he has sowed the county down in 10 year receipts for the Progressive Farmer. He gave as his home McCall, S.C., but about a month ago he moved to a house on Benton Heights. He had evidently found Union county such a soft spot that he decided to make his bed here a long time.
About the first of August Tom Broom was in the office of the Progressive Farmer at Raleigh and remarked that an agent was taking a lot of 10 year subscriptions in Union county. The newspaper people sat up and took notice when this agent’s name was called, for, they said, that man’s credentials had been withdrawn and they were looking for him. Along in September they wrote the Sheriff to look out for him and the Sheriff arrested him yesterday at his home.
When the news got out that he had been arrested, farmers with his receipts began to show up and the woods turned out to be full of them. Sheriff Fowler wants to hear from every one who has such a receipt. Whether any of the money will be recovered or not is not known. It is doubtful. The fellow told a tail that caught the wisest, and he found victims everywhere. How he expected to get away with it is hard to understand. He was not turning the money into the office, and he must have known that sooner or later there would be a leak. He told tom Broom that he took in $35 in one day on a single rural route. In some sections he got practically every man in the neighborhood.
From the front page of the Monroe Journal, Tuesday, Oct. 9, 1923
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