Lottery & Prize Scams

Lunenburg County is offering free safety sessions for seniors at Bridgewater Fire Hall, with the opening session covering common scams targeting older adults including grandparent scams, romance scams, fake bank investigator calls, and advance-fee lottery schemes. Police and safety coordinators advised participants to avoid sharing personal or banking information over the phone, be cautious with unfamiliar links, and verify identities before transferring money. Additional sessions on safe investing, legal information, and other safety topics are scheduled throughout October.

Instagram hosts multiple common scams including romance fraud, fake job offers, investment schemes, lottery scams, and predatory loan offers, which exploit the platform's large audience and users' willingness to share personal information. Scammers use tactics like catfishing, creating fake accounts, and building false trust to extract money, financial information, or personal data from victims. Users can protect themselves by verifying information outside Instagram, avoiding video call-averse contacts, reverse-image searching profiles, and being skeptical of unsolicited money requests or promises of quick financial gains.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird presented information on various fraud schemes affecting Iowans of all ages, including fake job offers, romance scams, imposter scams posing as family or law enforcement, lottery scams, and fake equipment sales in rural areas. The presentation emphasized that scammers exploit Iowans' trusting nature and create false urgency to pressure victims into sending money. Victims are encouraged to report suspected fraud to the Attorney General's Office at 888-777-4590.

Online scams cost Americans an estimated $119 billion annually, with the FBI reporting $20.9 billion in confirmed losses in 2025, a 26% increase from 2024, while 73% of American adults have experienced some form of online scam. Criminals operating from compounds in Southeast Asia and Nigeria use romance and investment schemes—often involving fake cryptocurrency platforms—to defraud victims, with some operations involving human trafficking and coercion of people forced into scamming activities. The FBI advises victims to stop sending money immediately, preserve transaction records, and report incidents at IC3.gov, while recommending people verify unexpected requests through official channels before providing personal information or making payments.

Access Bank launched a financial crime awareness campaign called "Spot the Scam" targeting Nigerian students to educate them on identifying and avoiding fraud schemes, which commonly include fake giveaways, job offers, celebrity impersonation, and investment scams. The campaign, running through December 2026, was prompted by concerns about young Nigerians' involvement in financial crimes, including a December 2024 incident where 792 young people were arrested for romance scams, hacking, and money laundering targeting overseas victims. The initiative includes nationwide financial education and a debate competition for secondary schools in Lagos State to help young people avoid becoming victims or perpetrators of financial crimes.

This article discusses how scam victimization results from both criminal activity ("homicide") and victims' own vulnerabilities ("suicide"), identifying three key factors that make people susceptible to fraud: hardwired behaviors like automatic compliance, curiosity triggered by clickbait, and emotional distortion that clouds judgment. The author recommends combating scams through financial monitoring, software updates, and adopting protective behaviors such as slowing down and questioning requests from unknown sources.

Fraud losses reported to the FTC reached a record $15.9 billion in 2025, up 27% from the previous year, with investment scams, romance scams, crypto scams, and impostor scams driving the increase. The article outlines 11 protection strategies including questioning unsolicited communications, trusting your instincts, avoiding phishing emails, using credit cards over debit cards, never sharing sensitive information like Social Security numbers or PINs, and being skeptical of spoofed caller IDs. Scammers increasingly use AI-generated fake websites, emails, texts, and videos to make their fraudulent schemes appear legitimate.

Americans lost $15.9 billion to fraud in 2025, with investment fraud being the costliest category at $7.9 billion in losses, and adults over 60 reporting significantly larger individual losses including six-figure amounts when victimized. Traditional scams—including penny stock schemes, grandparent impersonations, romance fraud, prize scams, and bank impersonation—have been refined through modern technology like text messaging, AI voice cloning, and social media to target victims more efficiently and at unprecedented scale. The article advises verification of financial advisors, use of family code words, skepticism of unsolicited money requests from strangers, and direct contact with banks using verified phone numbers rather

UK residents are experiencing a surge in scam calls and WhatsApp messages from spoofed mobile numbers offering part-time job opportunities, which security experts say is a "numbers game" where scammers only need a small percentage of victims to fall for the scheme. These recruitment scams typically start as seemingly legitimate job offers but eventually escalate to requests for money, deposits, or personal information, with scammers obtaining phone numbers from data breaches, marketing lists, social media, and old CVs. Security consultants advise blocking and reporting suspicious accounts without clicking links, and note that simply receiving such contacts doesn't indicate a data breach or immediate danger unless personal information or money has been shared.

Data brokers including Epsilon Data Management, KBM Group, Macromark, and Wiland Inc. sold "opportunity seeker" lists—targeting vulnerable older Americans—to fraudsters running sweepstakes, lottery, and other scams, resulting in over $23.7 million in losses to more than 218,000 victims in one scheme alone. The Department of Justice prosecuted multiple employees and companies, securing over $129 million in victim compensation by June 2025, with Troy Murray sentenced to 121 months in prison for selling data on 7 million older Americans to Jamaica-based lottery scammers from 2016-2023.