Most of us here at the Star Tribune know Bessie Chaten as the friendly lady who works nights in the cafeteria upstairs. She recently got a letter in the mail that seemed to offer her $2.5 million, in exchange for $20.

I suppose whoever wrote it - the return address is a box in a Mail Boxes Etc. store in New York City - didn’t count on anyone actually reading the incomprehensible text. It appears to have been written by a computer, on paper with images of eagles and stamps and places to sign and initial, with random combinations of official-sounding phrases, such as “Please send My Award Availability and Entry Data which includes all directives for proper entrant for payment participation.”

Finally, in small letters toward the bottom, is something that is the closest approximation of an explanation: “Award availability and entry data office carefully acquires and makes available entry directives for public available free awards and prizes. We report to customers for self-entry into such opportunities. Prizes are rendered by the reported individual sponsors. We do not pay awards.”

So, pay us $20 and we’ll enter you into some sweepstakes. If anyone else can make sense out of this thing (pdf here), please let me know.

Kay Wall doesn’t normally buy anything from people who come to her door in Eden Prairie. But the young man who appeared in June peddling magazine subscriptions had a convincing pitch. “It was basically giving him kind of a business opportunity to better himself,” Wall recalled.

So Wall paid $50 for a subscription to Military History, a magazine she thought her husband would like. That is, if he ever got to see it. The magazine didn’t come, and didn’t come, and didn’t come, even within the 120 days promised by the company, Urban Success, Inc. of Missouri City, Texas.

Wall called the company repeatedly. She got one “unintelligible” message in return and then finally spoke to somebody. The magazine was no longer being published, Wall was told, and she would receive a refund of her $50 by Nov. 14. It didn’t happen. Now the company’s phone number (866 617-0755) rolls over to an unintelligible person’s voicemail.

“I don’t know if this Urban Success went out of business, or was just a scam to begin with,” Wall said. “Against my better judgment, I got suckered in. I’m kicking myself for it.”

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Recently, the wife of my colleague Curt Brown received a letter from “Direct Processing Ltd” at their St. Paul home. The letter came with a realistic check, and an enticing letter, offering a $75,000 windfall.

“Your name was selected through a random ballot system through the use of your Credit/Debit card at participating outlets,” it said.

Depending on whether you go by the address on the letter or the one on the accompanying check, Direct Processing Ltd. is located in an office building on Bay Street in Toronto or at Chicago’s 233 South Wacker Drive, otherwise known as the mighty Sears Tower. I couldn’t find listings for either.

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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.

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