You get a card, call, or email telling you that you won! Maybe it’s a lottery, sweepstakes, or some other prize. The person calling is excited and can’t wait for you to get your winnings.
But here’s what happens next: they tell you there’s a fee, some taxes, or customs duties to pay. They ask for your bank account information, or ask you to send money via a wire transfer or to purchase gift cards and provide the card numbers.
Any way you send it, you lose money instead of winning it. You don’t get a big prize. Instead, you get more requests for money, and more promises that you won big. Scammers can be very convincing, and who wouldn’t want to win big!
Lottery and sweepstakes scams are one of the most common consumer frauds operating today. According to the FTC, these scams were the third-most common type of fraud reported to the agency in 2017.
Earlier this year, the FTC took action against an operation we alleged targeted older people with phony sweepstakes offers. The company sent mailers that made people think they had won $1 million (or more!), and that the recipient only needed to pay a small fee to claim their big prize win.
Keep your money – and your information – to yourself. Never share your financial information with someone who contacts you and claims to need it. And never wire money to or share gift card numbers with anyone who asks you to. Both payment methods are a sure sign of a scam.
Pass this information on to a friend. You probably throw away these kinds of bogus offers or hang up when you get these calls. But you probably know someone who could use a friendly reminder.
If you spot a scam, report it to the FTC at ftc.gov/complaint. Your report can help FTC investigators identify the scammers and stop them before they steal someone’s hard-earned money.
OK let’s do this again. Do not ever ever give out your personal information to anyone. If you know someone, a parent, aunt, uncle, anyone tell them to please not fall for this scam if you think there is any chance they would do this. Scams only work when consumers continue to play into the hands of these thieves, and apparently they do. Its so sad to see someone give up hard earned money for nothing, or savings money or retirement money, doesn’t matter, there is no sense in giving money away.
I used to think these creeps would run out of ideas, they do not. FTC has filed charges against these people who run the robo calls. Billions of calls have been made to consumers across the United States. Charges were filed in Federal Court.
Based on this alleged conduct, the FTC charged Christiano, NetDotSolutions, and TeraMESH with assisting and facilitating: 1) illegal robocalls, 2) calls to number on the DNC Registry, 3) calls with spoofed caller IDs, and 4) abandoned calls, in which TelWeb hung up on consumers who answered
Salisbury and three companies related to World Connection are charged with initiating or causing the initiation of: 1) calls with unlawful prerecorded messages, 2) calls to numbers on the DNC Registry, and 3) making calls with spoofed caller IDs. They are also charged with assisting and facilitating TSR violations by others. The FTC is seeking a court order stopping the defendants’ illegal conduct, along with appropriate civil penalties.
I have a suggestion for the penalty, stiff fine for each and every illegal call made and calls to consumers on the DNC list. I think this is the only thing that these people will understand. Stop and desist does not work, and throw them in jail for awhile and let them contemplate why they are there, more than likely they will simply be thinking of a new scam, or a way to continue robo calls.
Hopefully the judge will throw the book at them and anything else he can find. If it sounds too good to be true it usually is.
Be safe out there.
Thanks to FTC for the information presented
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