Too good to be true? Hell, yes.

You receive a letter in the mail explaining that you've just won the tidy sum of $85,000. All that's needed to claim your grand prize is to forward $980 to some company you've never heard of before who claims to be running a contest that you have never entered. What do you do?

Most people would scoff at the silliness of it all and toss the balled-up paper in the trash. Conscientious citizens may be driven to take an extra step and alert their local fraud squad. But who the hell falls for it?

Raymond Ross is a custodian in a local school district and his wife works part time. They and their two teenage boys live in a one-bedroom home in Azusa.

What annoyed me about this one is the headline "Family victimized by Canadian lottery scam," as if to imply that this is a government sanctioned theft (like the GST), or that bilking the dense is some new Canadian pastime. It seems a more appropriate headline may have been "Family victimized by own stupidity and desperation."

I'd like to feel a little more sympathetic. I get the impression that this family probably makes it's best meals of squirrels they manage to trap outside their kitchen window, and could ill-afford to lose a thousand dollars. But this hard-earned lesson in common sense may just what the need to get themselves back into a reality more closely mirroring our own.

Family victimized by Canadian lottery scam [whittierdailynews.com]

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