13/04/2005

The flood of fake prize draws seems unstoppable and now the scamsters are
targeting the old and vulnerable. Hugh Thomson reports.

Last week Bright Lotto, based in Rome, informed me that I had won $2m
(almost 1m). I was one of 10 lucky winners. All I had to do was contact the
lottery's agent, a Floritz Manuel. I did no such thing, knowing that such
calls result in the company concerned getting richer, not me.

Recently, the Office of Fair Trading, in its "scam awareness month", drew
attention to the growing menace of fake prize draws, sweepstakes and foreign
lottery mailings.

A fortnight ago, the OFT took action against one such firm - Jackpot
Promotions - over its "misleading advertising" of prizes. Jackpot Promotions
sent unsolicited telephone messages to over 7m consumers, informing them
they had won a prize. Only after ringing a premium rate telephone number did
almost all of the 15,500 people who responded discover they had won a cruise
voucher with stringent terms and conditions attached.

Other scams require consumers to send off an administration or
"registration" fee in order to secure their lottery win - in most cases no
jackpot is forthcoming. Or people have to pay a fixed fee of 20 to receive
"guaranteed" prizes that either fail to appear or are worth just pennies.

But what is particularly worrying is that many of the consumers who fall for
these tricks are pensioners. Age Concern says it is becoming increasingly
concerned by this trend. It estimates that 80 per cent of those who respond
to lottery scams are over 65 - and urged all pensioners to be cautious of
unsolicited phone calls, junk mail and e-mails.

Help the Aged agrees. David Sinclair, the social inclusion policy manager
for the charity, says: "These scams are carried out by conmen. We can't say
it often enough - if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

Sinclair adds that postal scams have been around for quite some time, but
that recently there has been a massive growth in fake telephone lotteries
and prize draws. "We don't know in terms of numbers the scale of the
problem, but it is likely to go under-reported because people don't like to
admit that they have been conned," he says.

According to Sinclair, there is growing evidence that people who have
responded to one of these phone calls or letters are likely to be inundated
with similar scams.

"We would encourage older people to report any letter like this to their
families, friends or police. The conmen may be operating in a particular
area and drawing attention to it might stop other people from falling for
it," Sinclair says.

Worryingly, it also appears that many of these scams are targeting people in
sheltered accommodation and old people's homes.

Pauline Edwards is the manageress of the Vintry sheltered accommodation
complex in Eastbourne. She says: "Almost everyone on this estate and in the
care home is receiving this mail. It certainly looks like these providers
have lists and pass them round among each other."

She says the home itself cannot stop one of their residents responding. As
she points out "at the end of the day, it is their money".

Edwards says the home can sometimes agree with the families of those in care
to get unsolicited mail stopped (for more details see below) but even with
such bars in place, some mail continues to arrive.

But the post and telephone can only be blocked if those living at the
relevant address agree to it. Victor Harman, a motoring writer from
Macclesfield, tried to persuade his 91-year-old father to sign up for such a
service, but he refused to co-operate.

Harman's father lives in sheltered accommodation, and has lived alone for
the last five years following the death of his wife. As Vic says: "He is an
intelligent man, having been an engineer for many years, and subsequently
running a sub-post office."

This did not stop him being sucked into the lottery scams. Harman says that
some months ago both he and his brother noticed the presence of a number of
lottery draws in the post, but at the time paid little attention to it.

"Then he began to talk about it, and conversation during my visits often
focused on these draws. It wasn't only phoney competition prizes but phoney
lawyers saying he had inherited some money."

It transpired that Harman's father had spent between 700 and 800 in six
months. Harman says: "It was not just his savings he was spending on these
lotteries, it was his state pension as well. When he ran out of cheques, he
was using his pension to send off postal orders to these lotteries and
competitions."

Not surprisingly, no lottery wins or unclaimed legacies materialised. Harman
says: "We have tried to stop this junk mail that was in the house, but no
doubt more will arrive."

Harman is not alone. Viv Knowland, a London-based reflexologist, says her
father was "plagued" by scams during the last nine years of his life - he
died aged 89 last year. "They offered him prize draws which didn't take
place, guaranteed prizes which were worthless, lottery winnings which never
materialised and the rest. All he had to do was send anything between 5 and
19.99 to secure his prize."

She says he was not wealthy. After living expenses he had a disposable
income of about 400 a month, but at one point he was spending about 100 a
month on these offers.

"When he died, we cleared out a whole drawer full of worthless pens,
jewellery, watches and the like - the so-called guaranteed prizes."

She adds: "Whenever I visited him, I cleared away as much of this vicious
junk mail that I could. I even wrote to the companies - many had foreign box
numbers as their addresses. That didn't stop them; they even managed to
track him down when he moved into sheltered accommodation. I told him many
times that he would have been far better off buying a lottery ticket every
day. At least there is a genuine chance of winning a prize and it would have
been far cheaper."

http://www.money.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2005/04/13/cmscam13.xml&menuId=244&sSheet=/money/2005/04/13/ixfrontperson.html