I wanted to let people know about a new scam being perpetrated in this country by foreigners:

What they do is send you a letter in the mail with no return address. In the envelope is a letter (which doesn not look office) stating that you won the lottery and enclosed is a check for about $4,500. The check is drawn on Bank of America or another large bank (so it looks real). The letter tells you to cash the check, but you have to send the lottery company $3,500 back to pay for taxes and fees.

So what happens, is that the recipient cashes the check for $4,500 and then sends money (the $3,500) overseas to pay for the taxes and fees. The check recieved (lottery winnings) will bounce within three weeks and the bank will reverse the credit to your bank account with a debit to recover the $4,500 from the recipient's account. In the end the recipient is out the money that he/she sends to the lottery company (which is overseas) and there is no way to recover it.

The FBI and Attorney General do not police it because it is out of their jurisdiction. Usually this crime is done out of Canada or the UK, but the original source of the fraud is Nigeria.

So, if you receive a letter stating you won a lottery and its from another country and it asks you to send them money, its a scam. Just report it to the Attorney General's office.

There are a number of similar scams as well. There is one scam where someone from Nigeria or some other country out of US jurisdiction contacts people and tells them they can make $1000.00 a week working out of their home. What happens is the scam artist uses stolen credit cards to purchase items via the internet. Then, the new "employee" receives the stolen items at their home after they have run through a couple of other addresses to kind of launder the stolen goods. Her or his job is to repackage them and ship them off to the theif. In return, the their actually does send a check to the "employee" to keep her working. But, sooner or later, the FBI shows up at your door and tells you what is going on and many times may arrest you. Tens of thousands of dollars of goods are shipped overseas using this method before the "employee" is caught and told the story. That's why it is worth it to pay someone $800 or a $1000 dollars to re-ship the stuff, its generally worth 5 and 10 times that even on the black market. Heads-up everyone, there is a lot of this kind of stuff going on.