My mom got this thing in the mail telling her she won $250,000

[ccharles000]

The letter said this-

following the official results of international sweepstakes drawn on
january 20th 2009,in the uk which was organized by fidelity international lotto and so forth.


-they have a number for her to call and claim the money. Should she call?




I just looked up fidelity international lotto and it is a scam so I will tell her not to call.

[petronius]

1. In snail-mail? That's unusual, but definitely a scam

Those are more common online, where they don't have to pay for paper and stamps.

It might be worth trying to figure out why/if she was targeted - has she been doing anything that might make people think she was particularly vulnerable to getting ripped off?

[HopeHoops]

2. I got one too (SCAM) from Canada - check for $5K, deposit and wire back $3K

The check looks mostly real (no watermark if you hold it to the light, though). Still, it is a scam, plain and simple. I'm not having much luck figuring out who to report it to.

[jobycom]

3. We had a check stolen from the mailbox at my work once.

We wrote a check for lots of dollars and someone stole it somewhere out of a mailbox. It wound up in Canada, where it was mailed with a new recipient to someone in Michigan, who called us before depositing it to see why we would write them a check. We had to close the account and shred hundreds of checks and all that stuff.

So a year later we get a call from California (we're in Texas) from someone who had received a check in the mail exactly as you described. It was for $5k, but the instructions wanted them to deposit the money and send $2K back to their account. They didn't even take our name off the check. Over the next week we got ten calls, and there's no telling how many people didn't bother calling. We never heard whether anyone tried to deposit the check, since the account was long closed.

Sounds like part of the same crime circle.