Magazines at the Door

It’s doorbell season again and the Boys and Girls Club sent along this warning:

 Boys & Girls Clubs of King County (BGCKC) has discovered that recent suspicious activity has been wrongly attributed to the organization. Recently, residents of the Montlake / Madison Valley area reported that some young men have solicited magazine subscriptions benefitting BGCKC through a company called P.S. Circulation. Earlier last year, this same occurrence was reported in Greenwood/North Seattle and Queen Anne. Boys & Girls Clubs of America do not solicit donations using young people to sell magazines.

Door-to-door magazine sellers in greater Seattle mentioning the Boys & Girls Clubs may be engaged in illegal activity. Please notify police if you are solicited in such a manner.

We had a magazine seller come to our door yesterday, so they’re here in Wallingford now. He said it was for a charitable cause, although which one wasn’t clear.

When we’ve discussed this soliciting previous, some commenters have suggested the magazine sellers are “casing” houses. I don’t know about that, but the business model around these is not charitable, neither to true charities nor to the sellers themselves, only to the companies dispatching them. The National Consumer League has a decent summary of the situation on their Fraud.org web site.