My colleague, online reporter Tim Harlow, wrote this dispatch about a deal that sounds just a little too good to be true:

Terri Hagen of Frederic, Wis. was a tad suspicious when earlier this month when she received a letter from an organization calling itself Powerball America 2008 stating that she’d won $498,750 in a lottery. Turns out she was right to be wary.

The letter came with an official-looking check for $3,980 and a few instructions. To get her money, all Hagen had to do was call a phone number, which happens to be registered in Canada. Upon verifying her claim with an agent, Hagen was to cash the $3,980 check, then send that amount to the clearing house “to pay an insurance fee and small processing fee” required by the Sweepstakes by-law, the letter said.

Red flags abound with this letter. First, the address listed on the Powerball America 2008 letterhead, 111 Bethel Road NE., Olympia, Wash., doesn’t exist, according to a spokeswoman with the Olympia Public Works Department. Second, in a voice mail left on my office telephone by an agent who identified himself as William Chambers, he left the incorrect toll-free phone number. The letter instructs callers to dial 1-888-275-4076, but Chambers’s message says to call “1-888-275-4067,” which belongs to an organization called Write to Redress.

When finally reached by phone, Chambers said Powerball America operates in 15 states and has been around since 1983. Yet there is no mention of any previous winners to be found, and the only reference to the organization online is the heart-wrenching story of an upstate New York woman who sent $3,980 to Powerball America 2008 and is now facing eviction because she can’t pay her rent.

“We keep the names of winners private. We don’t publish them on newspapers or web sites,” Chambers said. He assured me that this deal was real.

The $3,980 check Hagen received with her letter came from the “Rick Moore Group” with an account at the Wells Fargo in Bellevue, Wash. She said that she called that bank and a supervisor there confirmed it was a “scam.”

Brian Bergson, a spokesman with the Minnesota Attorney General’s office, said he could not discuss whether any Minnesotans had been taken in by Powerball America, but he did say when it comes to scams like this “we see them all the time and it only takes one bite.”

Apparently several versions of the letter similar to the one Hagen received have been sent to households across the United States under various versions of “Powerball.” On the web site 800notes.com, a web site that people can report unwanted and unsolicited calls, a South Carolina woman posted that she received a letter telling her to call 1-778-227-5520 because she won the Oregon Powerball 2008.

“Huh?,” she wrote. “I’ve never played.”

Bergson said anybody who receives such a letter should call the Minnesota State Attorney General at 651-296-3353.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under Scams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.