The company I’m going to introduce you to was set up and officially documented. It was named the South Carolina Assets Recovery Services — they called is SCARS. The new firm created a giant database in which it collected the addresses of hundreds of people.

To those folks in the database, SCARS sent out letters informing the people that the company was holding money which was owed to them for a variety of reasons.

We’ve read in the newspapers about people receiving checks from the state treasurer’s office representing unclaimed money owed to people whose addresses have been lost.

Many of these letters hit paydirt. People began calling the toll-free telephone number listed in the letters — letters which promised big refunds. During telephone interviews address records were updated and new contact information added.

With new information available, Deputy U.S. Marshals from South Carolina fanned out all over the state. Within a two- week period, more than 415 people were arrested for crimes ranging from driving under the influence to murder. Many of the criminal cases involved drugs, the Marshal’s Office reported.

I guess you’ve figured out by now that SCARS was really a sting operation set up by cops. SCARS wasn’t a phony company. It was a real company, all right — a truly documented firm, except this firm was run by cops whose purpose it was to ferret out wanted criminals who’d been hiding to avoid arrest.

The entire sting operation, although orchestrated by the Marshal’s Office, involved more than 30 state and local law enforcement agencies. It was a major cooperative effort to scrape some bad guys off the streets and out of our lives.

S.C. District U.S. Marshal Johnny Mack Brown, for many years the Sheriff of Greenville County, commented on the sting operation saying, "Greed is sometimes a good thing."