Kimball Hall was targeted by a pair of men selling magazine subscriptions, possibly as part of a nationwide scam based out of New York.

According to residents, two unknown individuals entered Kimball on Tuesday afternoon, going door-to-door soliciting students to purchase magazines and donate to charities, requiring that they sign checks on the spot. While residents and housing officials were convinced the individuals were con artists, the Department of Public Safety, upon making contact with the pair, deemed that “they were there conducting legitimate business.”

At 2 p.m., a Kimball resident contacted residence officials about a young man trying to solicit magazine subscriptions from students in the building, according to Sue Nunan, director of housing assignments.

Nunan said in an email to The Daily that officers were contacted immediately following the report and that later in the afternoon residents were reminded to enforce resident security measures by not propping doors and first floor windows open.

Stanford Police Deputy Chris Cohendet said in an email to The Daily that officers concluded after speaking with the suspects that their claims were authentic.

In an email sent out to the Kimball residence list, however, Aram Zinzalian ‘10 claimed that the two men tried to sell him magazine subscriptions on behalf of Jaguar Sales LLC, and after researching the company online, he became convinced they were frauds.

Jaguar Sales LLC has been the subject of numerous accusations and legal disputes nationwide, ranging from unlawful employment and sales practices to sales fraud, according to the Office of the New York State Attorney General.

In August 2007, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed suit against the company in State Supreme Court, charging that the company illegally recruits young workers to sell magazine subscriptions, requires them to travel far from home to solicit sales, withholds their wages and prevents them from returning home.

Those residents who were propositioned by the magazine solicitors said that the men appeared very unprofessional and came across as extremely suspicious.

“I let them come into my room and talk to me for like 15 minutes,” said one Kimball resident, who wished to remain anonymous out of concern for her safety. “It was not a good idea in retrospect.”

According to the resident, the two individuals knocked on her door and claimed that they were selling magazine subscriptions as part of a contest through which they could win a trip to Europe.

She said the two men were charming, but aroused her suspicions. In addition to being dressed casually, she said, they were unusually fast-paced in their presentation and placed a great deal of pressure on her to buy something. A sheet showing the list of magazines they were supposedly selling also struck her as strange.

“It almost looked like a sheet of paper from a magazine cut out and laminated,” the resident said.

After trying repeatedly to convince her to purchase a magazine subscription — the cheapest one was $65 — the men then tried to convince her to donate money to an unrelated charity. It was then that she remembered an email that had been sent out to the dorm list about unidentified men trying to get residents to buy magazines.

“There had already been an email to the dorm about possible magazine scammers, but it didn’t register at first,” the resident said. “I checked it again as they were talking to me.”

Other residents approached by the magazine solicitors gave similar accounts of their interaction. Megan Li ‘08 had read the warnings of the possible scammers before they approached her, and she tried several times to get them to leave her room. When she refused to purchase any magazines, the men claimed that her neighbor had donated a book to a children’s hospital instead of buying a magazine. Li later learned that her neighbor had refused them as well.

“After about a good five to 10 minutes of refusal, they finally left — after asking for my phone number and if I had a boyfriend,” Li said in an email to The Daily. “At the same time they left, someone on the Kimball email list said that there were cops on the third floor looking for these guys, so I sent back a response that the scammers had just left my room.”

After approaching numerous residents on more than one floor of Kimball, a staff member, who had been alerted of their presence, approached the men and asked them to leave.

“While on the second floor, I saw no one in the hallway except for two unfamiliar guys knocking on a door and when I asked whether they were selling magazines, they replied ‘No,’” the staff member said in an email to The Daily.

“I figured that if they were just visiting friends in the dorm, that would be apparent once they were invited in,” she continued. “When the resident opened the door, however, they said that they got the wrong room and headed out. At that point, I told them that if they were the ones selling magazines, they needed to leave because Kimball does not take solicitors.”

While the incident brought to light the dorm’s potential vulnerability to intruders, for some it also highlighted some alarming tendencies in the way students perceive outsiders. When the staff member sent out her own email alert to residents warning about the solicitors, she described them simply as both “young, dark looking.”

ASSU Vice President Mondaire Jones ‘09, a Kimball resident, responded with a dorm email asking that residents rethink this description of the suspects, as “we all know that description can apply to a ton of people, possibly in the thousands, at Stanford.”

“I don’t think it was malicious at all,” Jones told The Daily, “but I do think that, when presented with unsavory situations, we at Stanford as students, and as citizens, need to go about it in a very responsible way.”

He added that such generalized descriptions can “raise false suspicions about people” and that the staff member should have “described attire” when portraying the suspects. Following Jones’ email, the staff member apologized to the dorm for her choice of wording.

As far as residence officials know, no one from Kimball or anywhere else has come forward claiming to have given money to the individuals.