Every time and everywhere human society has congregated to the point sufficient to produce currency, grifters have emerged to skim and scam the citizenry.
One of the most insightful and entertaining chroniclers of the art of artifice was William Sydney Porter, who wrote as O. Henry.
Figuring prominently in the O. Henry canon is a fictional character described as thus in The Gentle Grafter: "Jeff Peters has been engaged in as many schemes for making money as there are recipes for cooking rice in Charleston, S.C."
Also figuring prominently in some Jeff Peters stories is our humble state, particularly the fictional towns of Peavine and Fisher Hill.
Peters tells of "striking" Fisher Hill after being run out of another town, limited on finances, but able to secure enough credit at the local druggist for some corks and bottles.
With leftover labels and ingredients, Peters noted that "Life began to look rosy again after I got in my hotel room with the water running from the tap, and the Resurrection Bitters lining up on the table by the dozen ...
"Fisher Hill was a low, malarial town; and a compound hypothetical pneumocardiac anti-scorbutic tonic was just what I diagnosed the crowd as needing."
Ultimately Peters contrives to part Fisher Hill's fictional foolish mayor and his money, with O. Henry's signature twist at the end.
In describing his adventures in "The Man Higher Up," Peters relates that a crossroad wrong turn landed him accidentally on Peavine's Main Street, where long-memoried locals took him by surprise and his horse by the bridle:
"It seems I had already assaulted and disfigured Peavine the spring of the year before. I had sold $600 worth of young fruit trees there--plums, cherries, peaches and pears ...
"Their fruit trees hadn't lived up to their labels. Most of 'em had turned out to be persimmons and dogwoods, with a grove or two of blackjacks and poplars. The only one that showed any signs of bearing anything was a fine young cottonwood that had put forth a hornet's nest and half of an old corset-cover."
O. Henry's lighthearted treatment of swindlers can be misperceived as excusing their behavior; I've always viewed it as simply art imitating life. Grift exists and always will.
Imaginative as he was, O. Henry couldn't have conceived what exploits Jeff Peters might have accomplished in the era of the Internet.
I'm thinking particularly about the online environment surrounding what is called "crowdfunding."
If that word sounds new, it is. Coined in 2006, it has the ring of wordplay O. Henry might have conjured up.
Crowdfunding is basically a way to raise money from a large number of donors over the Internet.
There are a number of websites that serve as platforms to unite pro-jects and funds, and an exponentially growing number of people who post their needs on them.
At popular site GoFundMe.com, the crowdfunding campaigns are categorized, with some of the most common including education, medical, emergency and sports.
On the Education page, one guy in Connecticut has a project titled "Help Me Stay At Yale," which has raised $1,895 from 62 donors. Another girl in Ohio received $4,950 from 33 donors under "Help Me Join Medical School."
When I search by zip code, there are 101 projects near Jonesboro and 601 in Little Rock.
Many of the projects have raised only a few hundred dollars, but collectively GoFundMe.com has raised $380 million.
One recent Mississippi campaign sought funds for a 3-year-old girl mauled by pit bulls on April 9. Victoria Wilcher lost her right eye and suffered terrible facial wounds and was in a Jackson hospital for a month.
At the end of April, a GoFundMe.com project was created asking for donations, which trickled in: by June 12, only $595 had been donated.
That all changed on June 13, when the child's grandmother created a Facebook post showing Victoria wearing an eye patch and a crooked, scarred smile with the heading "Does this face look scary to you?"
The post went on to tell how Victoria had been asked to leave a KFC restaurant in Jackson because her face was disturbing the other customers.
Not only did the episode explode as national news, but donations poured in--$135,000 over the next 10 days.
The only problem was, the incident never happened, at least not as described. The grandmother and child never appeared on KFC security footage, and the food combination they ordered (sweet tea and mashed potatoes) didn't show up on register receipts.
Even so, KFC graciously donated $30,000 to help with Victoria's medical expenses.
Unfortunately, this one story may be all most people have heard about crowdfunding, which has extreme potential to help people help others (all donations here still helped innocently victimized Victoria).
It's a state honor that Arkansas is consistently ranked high in charitable giving (no. 7 in 2012), despite the predation of real and concocted con artists like Jeff Peters.
If you're interested, there are probably some worthy causes around your neighborhood listed on one or more of the several crowdfunding websites.
Go find and fund--but always be cautious.
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Dana Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 08/08/2014