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The venerable Nigerian scams have an additional coloration, that of lottery winnings just waiting for the intended recipients to claim them. Folks receive out-of-the-blue e-mails from legitimate-sounding lottery organizations assuring them that they are winners in drawings recently held in distant countries and are now in line to receive hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of dollars. The prize money varies from lottery e-mail to e-mail, but the result is always the same: rather than collecting a small fortune in cash, the winners end up paying out increasingly large amounts of their own money in a futile effort to collect prizes that forever remain just out of reach. Each lottery e-mail is rich in detail about when and where the drawing was held, the lucky ticket numbers, how the fortunate person's or company's name had come to be included in the draw, who was to pay out the funds, the payer's phone and fax numbers plus his web site information, how much money is supposed to be coming, and just about anything else one could long for. At times all the supporting information is fashioned of whole cloth, but in other cases names of real lotteries and banks are invoked and look-alike web sites accessed through URLs similar to those of the real corporations or institutions are proffered by the con artists as proof of the scheme's being on the up-and-up. Things appear to check out, but only those blessed with unusually acute powers of observation notice those little shifts in detail, and not too many of them understand their import. Versions of this fraud are too numerous to list because the scammers running them continually change the names of the lotteries and their backstories. Just as the more usual Nigerian scam uses the lure of big money to be had for little or no effort to hook the unwary, so too do the lottery versions first hypnotize the about-to-be-gulled with visions of rich windfalls in the offing before lowering the boom. Those who try to collect their winnings soon find themselves on the receiving end of e-mails informing them that they have to fork over facilitation fees before the big payouts will come to them. Here is one typical follow-up: Expanded versions of the lottery con have the thieves sending checks to their victims for the full amount of their winnings but in the same breath telling them to remit a smaller named sum to an agency that handles the transfer, either for fees associated with preparation of the paperwork or to pay taxes associated with the win. But of course the large checks bounce, leaving the suckers out the value of the fees they mailed off to those running the con. Alternatively, checks for a smaller amount (usually a few thousand) are mailed to potential victims, along with the explanation that these funds are to cover the necessary fees the winners must pony up with. This form of the lottery con is an updated version of the cashier check scam. As in the original, the pigeons receive worthless checks from scam artists, deposit them into their own accounts, then wire the far smaller amounts requested to the crossroaders running the con. And yes, cashier's or certified checks can bounce. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) requires banks to make money from cashier's, certified, or teller's checks available in one to five days. Consequently, funds from checks that might not be good are often released into payees' accounts long before the checks have been honored by their issuing banks. High quality forgeries can be shuttled back and forth between banks for weeks before anyone catches on to their being worthless, by which time victims have long since sent off their own money to the con artists. No matter what form the scam takes, there are no lottery winnings waiting in the wings; there's naught but con men lurking back there tricking people into wiring handling fees directly into their accounts. The lucky winners scramble to pay the fees while the clock is ticking, and there are never any pots of gold at the end of their rainbows no matter how much they send or how quickly they send it. Just as in the original form of the Nigerian scam, one scheme after another to move the fortune will fall through, with each new attempt funded by the one waiting for his multi-million dollar something for nothing; the victim of the lottery version will pay for the privilege of receiving nothing. The money always flows in the opposite direction from what the victims have been led to believe, but those conned by such schemes often don't realize this until after their wallets have been vacuumed out a bit. This scam is run in the offline world too -- this con is not limited to cyberspace. Folks have reported receiving such solicitations in surface mail and via cell phone text message. Especially of note are the repeated cautions to keep matters confidential until final payout is made, as part of our security protocol to avoid double claiming and unwarranted abuse of this program by some participants. The thieves don't want news of false wins being trumpeted, lest the sound of it reach the real lottery people, who will wake the victims up to their being had, or the winners' friends, who will turn them on to this being a scam. The pigeons' keeping things quiet protects the grifters from being discovered before they've parted the gullible from the contents of their bank accounts.
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