British Random Lotto - Gateway Financial Management Services Ri[pff A check for you to deposit even have a # to verify it's legitimacy. Woman sounds so sincere. Total hoax Calgary Alberta

Here's how the scam works: you get a check and letter in the mail (full of misspellings and grammatical errors BTW), stating you've won the British Lottery for $85,000. The check is intended to cover "international clearance fees." Once you cash the check and call the # in the letter, they give you an address to wire the money to via Western Union, after which they'll send you the remaining ~$80K. If you do that, they get the money and you get a nasty phone call from the bank, stating that the check was bad. As if a reasonable person couldn't tell a check typed on a manual typewriter was fake.

I work for one of the companies on whose account these fraudulent checks are being written, and every morning I log into our corporate account and see 10-20 bad checks that people are attempting to draw. I reject them immediately, which leads to some of the people calling me a couple days later, asking why they have to pay the money back to their bank. Some of their sob stories are funny, some are sad, some are just pathetic, especially if they get the money from the bank and then spend it, then when the bank tells them to pay it back they can't, so their accounts are frozen and they can't withdraw any more money. Meanwhile, some con artist in Canada is sitting on a lot of money.

Think about it: if you really won money in a foreign lottery, why would you have to pay anything to get it? Wouldn't they just send you the net amount, minus the BS "clearance fees"???