Scam Attempts Target Rye Seniors

Seniors in Rye are receiving letters claiming they've won big sums of cash, but the letters are just attempts to scam them of thousands of dollars. 

The seniors are receiving official-looking documents that say checks totaling millions of dollars in winnings are supposedly coming in the mail.

All you have to do, the letters say, is follow a few simple rules and you will soon receive anywhere from $250,000 to $1.25 million in sweepstakes winnings.

Simply pay a processing fee of several thousand dollars allegedly due to cover the taxes, and the bonanza is yours for the keeping, according to instructions in a letter currently making the rounds.

Rye Manor's Annie Budd was among the so-called "winners" receiving the letters and so was neighbor Della Basso. 

But Annie, 91, and Della, 85, weren't born yesterday. So they didn't bite at the lucrative bait, tempting as it was to believe that they had won big bucks by allegedly being selected at random for mega-sweepstake winnings.

Instead they bit back at their alleged benefactors, reporting the scam to the Rye City Police Department and area Assemblyman George Latimer, Annie and Della told Patch. They aren't the only ones who have received letters. Rye Manor's Josephine Del Monte, 85, and other residents of the affordable senior housing complex have as well.

Annie Budd  said she received a check for $4,450 dollars from Beacon Home Health Agency in Houston, Tex., signed by a Lucille M. Hectose, although the last name listed as the authorized signature was scribbled in such a way it was virtually indecipherable.

"It came in a plain envelope with no return address, with the check to be drawn on the Wells Fargo Bank, and even though it came with an official-looking document, it looked suspicious so I tore it up," Annie Budd said, showing the check ripped in half and the document that came with it.

The document said she was one of the winners in the "Consumer Promotion Sweepstakes Drawing" organized for all taxpayers, households, telephone subscribers, car buyers and customers of the participating retail stores in the United States, U.K. and Canada for the promotion of families and customers well-being…under the auspices of Games and Gaming Association."

The letter allegedly came from the Consumer Protection Department of a Pacific Trust Financial Services company at a Canada address. It listed the name of an assigned claims agent with a phone number, two tax agents, and instructions for a tax amount to be paid on the winnings with Western Union or Money Gram among the payment methods.

That was followed by two more similar notification letters coming in the mail over the course of the next several days, according to Ms. Budd. Those letters upped the alleged winnings to between $1.1 million and $1.25 million with a warning that time was running out to claim the escalating awards.

The notification letters included a return envelope for Ms. Budd's required tax payment to be sent to either an address in Buffalo, N.Y. or a New York City apartment on W.12th Street. The last letter was stamped "SECOND NOTICE" and "Last Day to Respond."

Ms. Budd's response was to nip the scam in the bud. She says she reported the elder scam to the Rye City Police and Latimer's office, as did Ms. Basso, who received similar scam offers from "Prize Registry Bureaus" in places ranging from Lehigh Valley, Pa., to Las Vegas.

Patch reviewed the scam offers and followed up with a call to the Rye City Police and Latimer's office.

Rye City Police Commissioner William Connors said the department got complaints along these lines "from time to time."

 "We have a simple rule of thumb: 'If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't true. So beware and inform us," he said.

"Technology is changing the way people get information off the Internet and identity theft is way up," Connors added. "It isn't just stolen credit cards and bad checks anymore. It is sophisticated scams, and unfortunately, they prey on the elderly."

Indeed, cyber crimes are on the rise with scammers frequently using the jackpot- winning ruse with the catch being that so called "winners" must  pay processing fees, custom duty and taxes to collect the prize money, according to Connors.

 "Almost everybody seems to know of someone from a third world country using the Internet to try to scam a gullible computer user who has allegedly won hundreds of thousands of dollars in a sweepstakes or inherited a large sum of money,"  Connors said.

Latimer said basically the same thing.

"If the complaints are turned over to us and the documents have a return address, we forward them to the State Attorney General for action. If there is no return address, we send them to the Westchester County Office of Consumer Fraud. And we warn our constituents to be on the lookout for elder scams, especially in this Internet era of identity theft."