Pike County authorities are warning county residents about a scam in the area involving bogus checks that are being sent through the mail.
Chief Deputy Steve Rushing said the sheriff’s department has received six bogus checks from county residents who received them in the mail.
“They come in various amounts,” Rushing said. “Anywhere from $2,900 all the way up to $4,000. People have brought them to us in after they received them in the mail and became suspicious.”
He said the checks are accompanied by a letter telling the recipient that they have won a lottery or sweepstakes award, and tells the person to cash the check and send the money to a Canadian address to cover taxes and the cost of processing and mailing the award.
She said the Secret Service is the primary investigator of these cases, because they have jurisdiction over counterfeiting, and because most of the scams are operating outside the country.
“We would investigate it if we found that it (the scam) is operating in Mississippi,”she said.
A spokesman for the Secret Service office in Jackson said similar lottery scams are occurring across the state and the nation.
He said the Secret Service has offices in foreign countries that investigate scams originating overseas.
“Canada is very supportive of our efforts to run these things down,” he said.
The attorney general’s office offers some tips to avoid becoming a victim to lottery scams:
• You can’t win a lottery that you you didn’t enter.
• It is illegal to enter a foreign lottery, so even if someone entered, they cannot win.
• A legitimate lottery isn’t going to ask for any money.
• If anyone believes they have been a scam victim, they should call the consumer division of the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office at 1-800-281-4418.
Rushing said the phony checks resemble a check from a legitimate bank, but the account numbers are fake and are not from the bank named on the check.
Mississippi Attorney General’s Office spokeswoman Jan Schaefer said the bogus checks are often good enough to fool even banks.
“They’ll make the check look like it comes from a legitimate business,” Rushing said.
“But if someone cashes it, it will be returned because the account doesn’t exist, leaving the person who cashed the check responsible for paying the back bank.”
Schaefer said the attorney general’s office receives about 10 complaints a day about the “lottery scam.”
