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"Avoid getting conned out of money by scam mail"

By admin | January 19th, 2008 | Featured

Junk mail is something that is irritating and annoying to most of us, but in most cases is pretty harmless – we simply tear open the envelope, discover the contents are simply junk, and dispose of the letter in the appropriate way. However, there is a more sinister, malicious type of junk mail that is targeted towards the more vulnerable consumers in the population, and these scam letters can end up costing victims a shocking amount of money, and in some cases even their homes.

These scam letters relate to all sorts of things, including foreign lotteries, fake prize draws, fake investments, and more. Of course, many of us can spot a scam letter a mile off, but there are people out there that fall for the lines that these fraudsters spin, and these are the people that are contributing to losses that amount to as much as £1 billion a year according to reports. The bad news is that once someone falls for this sort of scam they become the target of other fraudsters, and in some instances the victim keeps falling for these scams and ends up losing everything.

One industry official from the Office of Fair Trading recently stated: ‘There is a scam for everyone. They prey on people’s fears or anxieties or exploit their need for money. Once someone has sent off money or personal information showing that they are susceptible to a particular type of scam, they’ll be placed on a ’sucker’ list by the scammers and targeted repeatedly.’

The way in which these letter scams usually work is by informing the recipient that they have won an impressive cash prize via a draw or lottery – the first thing you need to ask yourself is what is the likelihood of you winning a draw or lottery that you never entered in the first place?

The letter then informs the recipient that the prize is being held in a secure place, and in order to have the cheque mailed or money transferred an administration fee is required. Once the victim has sent off the administration fee they hear no more about it – other than finding an increasing number of scam letters plopping through the letterbox.

The concerns over scam mail were highlighted recently after one elderly woman ended up losing around £30,000 and having to sell her home as a result of being conned by these fraudsters. The woman kept receiving letters informing her that she had won a large cash prize, and that she needed to send an administration fee to receive her prize. The situation got so bad that at one point she was receiving around thirty letters a day, according to her son, and for a period of ten years she kept responding to the letters and sending off the administration fee.

The victim quickly accrued debts of £30,000 until it got to the stage when she could no longer afford to pay her bills and started to get letters from the bank, at which point she told her son what had been happening.

He stated: “There was no indication as to how much debt she had got herself into. All she knew was that she was getting letters from the bank and she finally came to me and said: ‘Can you help me out. I went sorting through the house and found carrier bags full of these sorts of letters.”

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