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Man has himself to thank for avoiding lottery scam
| Friday, May 12 2006 10:15 PM
Last Updated: Friday, May 12 2006 10:19 PM
Patience and a little bit of skepticism saved Bakersfield resident Vernon Brown about $4,500.
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Brown likes to fill out online surveys and enter lots of contests on the Internet, so it wasn't completely impossible that he had won $1.5 million in a Netherlands Sweepstakes Lottery as he was told in a letter in March.
The rest of the plot is all too familiar. Brown gets a letter stating he has to pay nonresidential fees. To help him do it, the lottery company will send him a cashier's check.
All Brown has to do is deposit it and send it back to the company so it can release his full prize. But Brown wasn't born yesterday.
"I just don't trust a lot of things," Brown said.
That includes foreign lottery companies that send checks that appear to be from Unocal Corp. Sure, Brown deposited the check. After all, it might be legitimate. He just didn't send the money right away.
Brown waited to see if the check cleared. When it didn't, he was only out the $5 processing fee his bank charged him.
"If you voluntarily wrote a check out of your account, the bank is not going to cover you on that, then you are the loser," Bakersfield Police Department Detective Ryan Paslay said.
Brown wasn't the winner of $1.5 million, but his caution kept him from being a $4,500 loser, too.
Paslay said that caution is key to avoiding victimization. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Scammers will often send checks that seem to come from a well-known company but really aren't so, according to BPD Sgt. Scott McDonald.
If you find out you won a contest you don't remember entering, that should be a red flag.
"If you don't know that you intentionally entered a contest, you should be extremely cautious or critical of any mail you receive on a contest like that," Paslay said.