The last great case of fraud upon the Bank of England will fitly find a place in the later criminal records of Newgate. This was the well and astutely devised plot of the brothers Bidwell, assisted by Macdonell and Noyes, all of them citizens of the United States, by which the bank lost upwards of £100,000. The commercial experience of these clever rogues was cosmopolitan. Their operations were no less world-wide. In 1871 they crossed the Channel, and by means of forged letters of credit and introduction from London, obtained large sums from continental banks in Berlin, Dresden, Bordeaux, Marseilles and Lyons. With this as capital they came back to England via Buenos Ayres, and Austin Bidwell opened a bona fide credit in the Burlington or West End Branch of the Bank of England, to which he was introduced by a well known tailor in Saville Row. After this the other conspirators travelled to obtain genuine bills and master the system of the leading houses at home and abroad. When all was ready, Bidwell first "refreshed his credit" at the Bank of England, as well as disarmed suspicion, by paying in a genuine bill of Messrs. Rothschilds' for £4,500 which was duly discounted. Then he explained to the bank manager that his transactions at Birmingham would shortly be very large, owing to the development of his business there in the alleged manufacture of Pullman cars. The ground thus cleared, the forgers poured in from Birmingham numbers of forged acceptances to the value of £102,217, all of which were discounted. The fraud was rendered possible by the absence of a check customary in the United States. There such bills would be sent to the drawer to be initialled, and the forgery would have been at once detected. It was the discovery of this flaw in the banking system which had encouraged the Americans to attempt this crime.