There may have once been a legitimate program where people sold magazines door-to-door, but it seems like those days are long gone. Someone at my day job was recently in a neighborhood watch meeting where a police officer told them about a gang of criminals who were posing as magazine salesmen in the area and using the choice of magazine (along with a peek inside the house) to plan future robberies . . .
So I was attending our neighborhood watch meeting and one of the local police officers showed up and spoke for a bit. He told us about a group of criminals they just arrested in the area and the story really surprised me.
This group was going door to door. (They came to mine, I told them to take a hike) They were “selling” magazine subscriptions. They would ask the people who were at the door what they did for a living and justify this ask by saying they get extra “points” for selling magazines to Firemen or Police officers. Apparently both groups more statically likely to have firearms in the house.
They came up to a neighbors house who has some mounts in his garage and asked him if he liked to hunt…etc They apparently then asked if they could see his guns. He then proceeded to tell them to F*** off. He called the cops because he felt this was an odd question for magazine salesmen to ask. The police caught up with them in another subdivision, and ended up searching their car. They found cash, guns, and lists of hit no hit homes. Apparently they were gathering information on who was most likely to have guns in the house so they could later come back and rob them of their firearms.
The guns in the car came back stolen from a local Fireman. They later searched the suspects homes and found more guns stolen from a police officer and others stolen from homes on their list that had asked for subscriptions to outdoors (Field and Stream, Handgunner) magazines.
The take-away from this: never engage unsolicited businessmen. It’s the same as opening spam emails, nothing good will ever come of it. If you want a subscription to a magazine, contact the publisher yourself and don’t trust your credit card information or cash to someone you’ve never met.
That, and keep gun-related paraphernalia out of view of the front door. And definitely never buy any of these.
We’d just like to remind you that, in this time of pervasive surveillance and expensive magazine subscription rates, TTAG comes to you free of charge with completely anonymous delivery. Just sayin’.