Scam fleeces retired couple

BRENDAN KIR

Investigation begins after Foley residents lose more than $10,000 in bogus sweepstakes deal

Federal postal authorities have launched an investigation into a company that bilked a retired Foley couple out of more than $10,000 with a phony sweepstakes scam, authorities said this week.

The letter from the All American Publishers Association in June looked official and offered a tantalizing prize: $786,434. The letter came with a check for $4,518 to be used to pay "all applicable administrative fees.

By the time the retirees grew suspicious enough to cut off contact with the firm, they had sent three MoneyGrams totaling $10,550 to pay various fees and taxes.

The prize money never came.

"They didn't even bother to send him a counterfeit check," said Mike Willis, the team leader of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Mobile.

The original solicitation letter lists Donald Hendrix as the claims agent. Reached by phone, a man answering the number listed for Hendrix insisted the prize is legitimate and blamed the delay on a misunderstanding.

"They are on the way to the people in Foley, Ala. This is all going to be worked out," he said. "We're a multimillion-dollar corporation."

Hendrix then referred a reporter to the company's "legal department" and hung up the phone without providing contact information for that department.

The retirees, who agreed to tell their story as long as their names were not used, said they did not find out until last week that the check supposedly meant to pay the administrative fees was no good.

"How could we be taken in by this document that has no return address," the husband said this week, lamenting his error in judgment.

The retiree said he hopes other folks do not repeat the mistake.

"I would say, just don't trust any of it. The old adage, 'If it's too good to be true, it probably is' applies," he said. "Country folks like us just should not get involved with this."

Willis said he has referred information about the case to postal investigators in Orlando, Fla., where the All American Publishers Association supposedly is based.

Willis said his office gets reports weekly from people who have gotten solicitations promising prize money in various sweepstakes scams. It is much rarer, he said, that someone falls for the alleged con. Several months ago, a Whistler woman lost $45,000 in a similar a scam not involving All American Publishers Association, he said.

The woman, who is in her 80s and had recently had sold some property, was informed that she had won a $1 million prize. Willis said she was excited because her daughter lost her home in New Orleans to Hurricane Katrina.

The con artists kept coming up with new reasons why the woman needed to wire them money, and she kept sending it — a total of eight wire transfers until she finally ran out of money.

Willis said investigators traced the money to Nigeria, a nation long associated with scams targeting Americans.

"We've referred it to our international people, but it's not going anywhere," he said.

In the Foley case, the husband said he was skeptical right off the bat but deferred to his wife. He added that they have entered a number of magazine sweepstakes in the past, so it seemed plausible that they, perhaps, had won one.

The wife said she had planned to use a significant chunk of the winnings to support a church program that assists the war-torn refugees in the Darfur region of Sudan and desperately poor people elsewhere in Africa.

"I don't think the two of us could ever spend $600,000," she said. "Immediately when I learned about it, I thought, 'We don't need all this money, but it would be great to have it and spend it to relieve all those people in Darfur.'"

She said she had several phone conversations with a man identified as Hendrix. Why was it taking so long for the prize money to arrive? Why did they need to wire money to individuals in Alberta, Canada? Why was the $4,518 check sent with the original letter drawn on the account of Australian Gold, supposedly from Indianapolis?

The woman said the man on the other end of the line was smooth. "He had good answers," she said.

Added her husband: "Almost every time we talked to him, the money was on the way."

The couple said they finally gave up last week when the agent called back to tell them he needed another $5,000.

Willis, the postal inspector, said people should exercise caution and common sense.

"If you're notified that you won a contest that you didn't enter, ignore it," he said. "Throw it away. Refer it to us."

Willis said people sometimes suspend logic when they see their names attached to a prize with all those zeros at the end of a dollar sign.

"People want to believe they won," he said.