Minnesotans lose $30 million every year in bogus foreign lotteries and other international scams, a new anti-fraud partnership announced last week. According to the story by my colleague Greg Patterson, Minnesotans should start hearing and seeing all kinds of warnings about get-rich-quick schemes that are really ways of separating them from their dwindling assets.

The Minnesota Fraud Enforcement Partnership’s web site offers some common-sense tips:

Be wary of anything that promises large sums of money, such as sweepstakes or lottery winnings, in exchange for advance payment.

Be cautious about any business that tries to conceal their mailing address and phone number.

The site also features these tidbits about foreign lotteries, which offer even smaller odds than the domestic variety:

Playing a foreign lottery through the mail will pretty much guarantee that you will lose. Once you play, you’ll be put on a list. And you can count on receiving more “chances” to play - and lose.

Don’t give out personal or financial information to anyone over the Internet or phone who tells you you’ve won — but need to pay taxes or a fee to collect your winnings.

This info comes courtesy of lookstoogoodtobetrue.com, which is linked to the fraud partnership’s site. It’s a product of a number of government agencies, organizations and companies, including the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the FBI, the National White Collar Crime Center, Monster.com, Target and members of the Merchants Risk Council. Part of its mission appears to be to drum up business for companies like this one.

The site also features anonymous testimonials of the scammed. Reading them gave me some pessimism about the human condition, I must say, both from the prevalence of online predators, and the gullibility of those with burning desires for love, jobs, apartments, Broadway tickets and exotic birds. One story, signed by Bob of Minnesota, features a British “woman” who fell in love with him over email, but then got testy when he didn’t wire her money for plane tickets. He ended up sending her cat droppings and a fake million-dollar bill. Then he concludes: “I think that many people are taken by these scum because they want to believe that someone so beautiful loves them. In my case, I think that ‘Clara’ is probably a fat, hairy old man.”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under Buyer beware, How to blow the whistle, 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.