essay on lottery scamming

How lotto scammers defraud elderly Americans and fuel gang wars in Jamaica

Assistant Professor of Politics and Policy Studies, Elon University

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Damion Blake is a 2011 Drugs, Security and Democracy fellow who received research funding from the Social Science Research Council and the Open Society Foundations.

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Normally, January and February are high season for the Jamaican beach city of Montego Bay. But this year, an upsurge in shootings and other violent crime has lead many sunseekers to steer clear.

On Jan. 18, Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness declared a state of emergency in Montego Bay and surrounding St. James Parish. Hotels, restaurants, schools and government went on lockdown, with residents and tourists warned to “remain in their resorts” as police and military flooded the streets.

Since then, some 150 people have been arrested , two AK-47s and numerous other high-powered weapons seized and over 80 rounds of ammunition recovered. The 14-day state of emergency was recently extended until May 2.

Jamaican defense force chief Maj. Gen. Rocky Meade says law enforcement’s mission now is to restore peace in Montego Bay by disrupting gangs, particularly “those that are responsible for murders, lotto scamming, trafficking of arms and guns, and extortion.”

It may sound strange to lump in lottery scams with weapons dealing and homicide. But in Montego Bay, these crimes do fall in the same category.

I’m a Jamaican violence researcher who’s been monitoring lotto scamming – a lethal and growing financial fraud scheme in my home country – since as far back as 2013 .

The craft of scamming

In this illegal scheme, Jamaicans pose as lotto officials to convince vulnerable foreigners that they’ve won a big payout. To retrieve their winnings, the caller says, all they have to do is pay a modest “processing fee.”

According to my 2013 study , most perpetrators are young – aged 14 to 25 – and work as telemarketers, remittance services cashiers, hotel employees, taxi drivers, police officers, bank tellers and airline staffers. These professions give them access to the personal information of potential victims.

Largely, I’ve found the fraudsters tend to target Americans, especially the elderly, gamblers, tourists and people who run online businesses. In 2010, Jamaican lotto scammers defrauded US$30 million from scores of victims in the state of Minnesota .

Criminals locate their victims using the contact details on so-called “ lead lists ” gleaned from hotels and call centers. Services like Google Voice and Vonage allow them to mask their location so that their calls appear to come from an American phone number. They may also try to hide their Jamaican accent, though victims often say it’s clear they’re not American.

Fraudulent callers assure the victims of a large lottery prize, but then inform them that a processing fee is needed to access those funds. Using Western Union, MoneyGram or a Green Dot prepaid card, they manipulate their victims into sending them anywhere from $750 to $2,500 in a week.

Scammers may also menace victims who are reluctant to pay. Using Google Earth, they describe the victim’s home and say they’re waiting “out front,” threatening them with bodily harm .

Over time, Jamaica’s lotto scammers have accrued huge fortunes, earning up to $100,000 a week . This criminal enterprise thrives in the Montego Bay area, the heart of the Jamaican tourism industry . There, it is estimated that thousands of illicit entrepreneurs have gotten rich doing lotto scams since 2007 .

New gang wars

Montego Bay also has a long-standing history of gang disputes in poor neighborhoods. So lotto scammers, who generally come from those same violent areas, often use their dirty money to secure protection. They pay criminal organizations to defend their homes and families and bribe police .

Rich, protected and powerful, many lotto fraudsters eventually use their illegal earnings to purchase weapons and manpower, forming criminal gangs of their own and fighting for control over turf in Montego Bay.

As a result, the multimillion-dollar illicit economy is now fueling gang wars, corruption and homicides across western Jamaica. Montego Bay’s crime rate has spiked year upon year and murders have steadily climbed: from 203 in 2015 to 269 in 2016 and 335 in 2017 . Montego Bay’s homicide rate is now 50 times that of New York City .

The rising violence in St. James Parish comes amid a national crime wave. In the first 20 days of 2018, say national police, Jamaica saw 100 homicides – an average of five killings per day .

Last year’s murder toll of 1,616 homicides was up 19 percent over 2016 , when Jamaica already had the 10th highest homicide rate in the world .

Globalization: great for crime

Lotto scamming is, in many ways, just a 21st-century rendition of the criminal violence that has plagued Jamaica for decades.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Jamaican political parties first fueled bloodshed by paying and arming criminal groups to help them win at the polls . In the 1980s and 1990s, those same gangs took up drug trafficking and the weapons trade , taking advantage of Jamaica’s strategic maritime location between South America and the U.S.

Now, since 2006, lottery scamming has become their lucrative new revenue source. Estimates suggest that the fraud’s immense profits were behind approximately 50 percent of the 335 murders that occurred in western Jamaica in 2017.

Ultimately, lotto scamming – similar to transnational gangs like MS-13 and the $500 billion global drug market – is a byproduct of globalization . In shrinking the world, globalization has allowed goods, services, ideas, money and contraband to move easily across porous borders.

It’s unlikely Jamaica’s state of emergency can stop that.

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Are the roots of lottery scamming in our culture?

The first time I ever came in contact with any form of scamming was during one of my infrequent trips to New York, USA, in the early 1990s. Some of my friends had migrated — or run off — to the US and were figuring out their immigration status while hustling away in Brooklyn or The Bronx. One such friend explained that a planned shopping trip was imminent because of “a new credit card” that had been acquired from “the credit card guy” for US$50 with a spending limit of US$500. I did not understand.

Back then ordinary Jamaicans did not have credit cards. We saw them in movies and marvelled at how ‘rich’ these people were that they could simply run a card and buy anything they needed. My friend explained that this new credit card was part of an underground industry in which individuals would purchase credit cards and use them to acquire various niceties at the expense of others. I was horrified. How could you? Isn’t that stealing? I was informed that this wasn’t something bad, it was really about taking funds from those who had too much; for example, one of those “rich, old white women up North”. “But if I migrate to the US I would eventually have cards just like those,” I insisted. “You could be stealing from me!” The thought had never crossed my friend’s mind.

Today, credit cards, digital money, the Internet, and other related technologies are commonplace and credit card and lottery scamming are also part and parcel of the Jamaican reality. Jamaica has made headlines, news stories, and various features locally and internationally as the home of lottery scamming. Western Jamaica has been made notorious for lottery-scamming activities. But what exactly is at the heart of this explosion in lottery scamming and its close sibling, credit card scamming? Is it really true that dancehall is the cause, as a former minister of national security suggested to a group of Canadian-Jamaicans several years ago?

Lottery scamming is a close relative to other forms of con artistry and trickery that is based on the psychology of persuasion. The con artist uses a variety of strategies to gain the confidence of the target and persuade them to engage in specific actions. Often there are specific triggers that are selected based on the con artist’s understanding of the desires and/or interests of that individual. If successful, the con artist can exert his/her influence over the target and manipulate their responses and behaviour.

Lotto scammers can be likened to skilled marketers who are able to persuade individuals to part with their money for the promise of some benefit. The rise of the early business process outsourcing firms in western Jamaica, in particular the call centres, coupled with increased democratic expansion of Jamaica’s telephone networks, served as catalysts for the development of this sophisticated criminal network on the back of supportive historical, cultural, and social facets that already existed.

A key historical underpinning is the celebration of Anancy as an important figure in Jamaican history and culture. I have never been fond of him because all the stories I heard about Anancy were of his use of trickery to steal from his wife, children and friends. Every time I related an Anancy story I would lodge a caveat about these activities. Whatever happened to him along the Middle Passage, Anancy came to Jamaica from Africa as a con man. That trickster ethos, sometimes couched as a type of Robin Hood behaviour where you rob from the rich to give to the poor, continues to be celebrated in Jamaica. Its connection to capitalist-induced greed in this era means that the trickster imperative is socially supported, even though theft is a criminal act.

Another important cultural facet is the fact that Jamaicans are lyrical geniuses. The politician, pastor and artistes are three prominent forms of male identity whose popularity and prowess in Jamaica are based first on their use of words to connect with their audience, win their support, and convince them to engage in an activity of some sort. Indeed, ordinary Jamaican men are renowned for using only their lyrics to win a love interest, and stories abound about those who wrote letters and won the hearts of women in distant countries. Today, the telephone, Internet, WhatsApp, and other forms of social media provide unlimited access into the homes, hearts, and minds of those who can be wooed and convinced that it is in their best interest to part with their money. This ability to persuade with words continues to be a very crucial weapon in the arsenal of lotto scammers, especially when the target is not Jamaican, and the tricksters are trained and hold key personal and private information about their victims.

Many of us receive e-mail regularly telling us we have won millions of pounds or US dollars, or that someone wants to share an enormous fortune found in a vault with us. Others get phone calls promising riches after responding with the correct information, and paying a fee. Most Jamaicans do not believe these hooks, and few respond. But, using the “lead lists” gleaned from various telemarketing and other sources, lottery scammers successfully target vulnerable individuals in the USA, where it is more plausible that you could win a prize or be entered into a sweepstakes because you purchased an item at a particular store or dealership. Or, that if you won a prize in the sweepstakes some kind of fee would be necessary for administrative costs and to secure your winnings.

So how did it all come together? In a 2013 article on scamming Dr Damion Blake et al highlighted the Nigerian connection that was instrumental in showing Jamaicans in the West how to operate this predatory business model, sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s when “…four Nigerians operated the scamming business from Montego Bay. The Nigerians were later deported and $1.4 [million] returned to scammed victims; but by then they had interfaced with many Jamaicans who were introduced into the activities. Both police officers contended that when the matter came up in 1998, it was because of 15 complaints made by people in America whom claimed that they had won Australian Sweepstake from a Jamaican area code and were experiencing [challenges collecting] their prized money”. Many have laughed and poked fun at those who are conned out of their valuables, but display shock and horror when the lottery scamming exploded as a multimillion-dollar network, complete with gun-toting enforcers and personal bodyguards on the ground, and the succeeding waves of violence and murders that usually follow large sums of illegal monies in these networks.

The connections between scamming as a criminal activity and the rise of gangs and networks of violence are well-documented. Since the turn of the millennium, gang-related warfare and murders in the west, in particular St James, have kept the Government and security forces on their toes from as early as 2002. Violent crimes and gang warfare resulted in a peak in murders in St James, and in the 2015-2017 period murders moved from a staggering 212 to 369 in that parish alone. The introduction of the state of emergency initiative in January 2018 was one strategy to stem these activities. Yet, even with the introduction of new banking restrictions to hamper the flow of large sums of cash into the formal structures, arrests of various masterminds, increased police presence, and assistance from external sources, the multimillion-dollar fortunes that continue to accrue from the lottery scamming activities, as well as the flashy, well-resourced lifestyles it has bestowed on their peers, are incentives for many who see other options for employment as non-viable dead ends that promise them marginalised and hopeless futures. Indeed, the significant inroads into the lottery-scamming industry came almost a decade after the solidification of its various planks upon the supportive historical, social, and cultural networks that continue to energise this industry. The rise in crime, especially murders, in western Jamaica and its immediate environs, is directly connected to this cash-ridden industry that pulls many young, and not-so-young Jamaicans into its promise of overnight wealth complete with flashy symbols of success. Additionally, globalisation has made the world smaller and removed barriers that once restricted the movement of goods, services, ideas, money, and contraband across multiple borders. This all means that there is a great deal more work to be done before we can fully dismantle this strand in the interconnected web of crime and violence that continues to plague our society.

Donna P Hope, PhD, is professor of culture, gender and society at The University of the West Indies. Send comments to the Observer or [email protected].

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The New York Times

Magazine | the man who cracked the lottery, the man who cracked the lottery.

MAY 3, 2018

When the Iowa attorney general’s office began investigating an unclaimed lottery ticket worth millions, an incredible string of unlikely winners came to light - and a trail that pointed to an inside job.

The Money Issue

The baby-formula crime ring.

It’s pricey, it’s portable, its users need it constantly, and retailers love to buy it at a discount. All of which makes it a perfect product to steal.

The Pain Hustlers

Insys Therapeutics paid millions of dollars to doctors. The company called it a “speaker program,” but prosecutors now call it something else: a kickback scheme.

The Billion-Dollar Bank Job

In 2016, a mysterious syndicate tried to steal $951 million from Bangladesh’s central bank - and laid bare a profound weakness in the system by which money moves around the world.

The White-Collar-Crime Cheat Sheet

How the biggest scammers get away with it.

By REID FORGRAVE Illustrations by FRANCESCO FRANCAVILLA MAY 3, 2018

The file landed on Rob Sand’s desk with something less than a thud. Despite holding the contents of an investigation still open after more than two years, the file was barely half an inch thick. “Happy birthday,” his boss said.

It was not Rob Sand’s birthday. His boss, an Iowa deputy attorney general named Thomas H. Miller, was retiring in July 2014 after nearly three decades of prosecuting everything from murder to fraud. He hired Sand about four years earlier and made him the youngest prosecutor in a nine-attorney team that handled challenging cases all over the state. Now Miller was offloading cases to colleagues. This one, having to do with a suspicious lottery ticket worth $16.5 million, was full of dead ends. Investigators didn’t even know if a crime had been committed. The most tantalizing pieces of evidence were on a DVD: two grainy surveillance clips from a gas station. Sand slid the disc into his laptop and pressed play.

A man walked into a QuikTrip convenience store just off Interstate 80 in Des Moines. It was a weekday afternoon, two days before Christmas. The hood of the man’s black sweatshirt was pulled over his head, obscuring his face from two surveillance cameras overhead. Under the hoodie, he appeared to be wearing a ball cap; over the hoodie, he wore a black jacket. The man grabbed a fountain drink and two hot dogs.

“Hello!” the cashier said brightly.

The man replied in a low-pitched drawl, a voice that struck Sand as distinct: “Hell-ooooh.”

“Couple hot dogs?” the cashier asked.

“Yes, sir,” the man replied quietly, his head down.

The man pulled two pieces of paper from his pocket. They were play slips for Hot Lotto, a Powerball-like lottery game available in 14 states and Washington, D.C. A player — or the game’s computer — picked five numbers between 1 and 39 and then a sixth number, known as the Hot Ball, between 1 and 19. The prize for getting the first five numbers right was $10,000. But a much larger prize that varied according to the number of players who bought tickets went to anyone who got all six numbers right. The record Hot Lotto jackpot of nearly $20 million had been claimed in 2007. The jackpot at the time of this video was approaching the record. The stated odds of winning it were one in 10,939,383.

The cashier took the man’s play slips, which had already been filled out with multiple sets of numbers. At 3:24 p.m., the cashier ran the slips through the lottery terminal. An older man with a cane limped by the refrigerated section. A bus drove by. The cashier handed over his change. Once outside, the man pulled down his hood and removed his cap, got into his S.U.V. and drove away. The gas-station parking lot gleamed; there had been snow flurries that afternoon.

Two years into the case, that was virtually all the investigators had. Sand watched the video again and again, trying to pick up every little detail: the S.U.V.’s make; the man’s indistinct appearance: most likely in his 40s, and 100 pounds overweight, maybe more; the tenor of his voice.

Sand, a baby-faced Iowan who turned down Harvard Law School for the University of Iowa College of Law, had a background that seemed perfect for the case: a high school job writing computer code and doing tech support, a specialty in white-collar crime. His recent cases included securities fraud and theft by public officials.

The ticket in the video was purchased on Dec. 23, 2010. Six days later, the winning Hot Lotto numbers were selected: 3, 12, 16, 26, 33, 11. The next day, the Iowa Lottery announced that a QuikTrip in Des Moines had sold the winning ticket. But one month after the numbers were drawn, no one had presented the ticket.

The Iowa Lottery held a news conference. Phone calls poured in; dozens of people claimed to be the winner. Some said they had lost the ticket. Others said it was stolen from them. But lottery officials had crucial evidence that wasn’t publicly available: the serial number on the winning ticket and the video of the man buying it. One by one, they crossed off prospective claimants. One caller said his friend was a regular Hot Lotto player who had just died in a car wreck — should he go to the junkyard to search through his deceased friend’s car?

Three months after the winning ticket was announced, the lottery issued another public reminder. Another followed at six months and again at nine months, each time warning that winners had one year to claim their money. “I was convinced it would never be claimed,” says Mary Neubauer, the Iowa Lottery’s vice president of external relations. Since 1999, she had dealt with around 200 people who had won more than $1 million; she’d never seen a winning million-dollar ticket go unclaimed. “And then comes Nov. 9, 2011.”

A man named Philip Johnston, a lawyer from Quebec, called the Iowa Lottery and gave Neubauer the correct 15-digit serial number on the winning Hot Lotto ticket. Neubauer asked his age — in his 60s, he said — and what he was wearing when he purchased the ticket. His description, a sports coat and gray flannel dress pants, did not match the QuikTrip video. Then, in a subsequent call, the man admitted he had “fibbed”; he said he was helping a client claim the ticket so the client wouldn’t be identified.

This was against the Iowa Lottery rules, which require the identities of winners to be public. Johnston floated the possibility of withdrawing his claim. Neubauer was suspicious: The winner’s anonymity was worth $16.5 million?

One year to the day after the winning numbers popped up on the random-number-generator computers — and less than two hours before the 4 p.m. deadline — representatives from a prominent Des Moines law firm showed up at the Iowa Lottery’s headquarters with the winning ticket. The firm was claiming the ticket on behalf of a trust. Later, the Iowa Lottery learned that the trust’s beneficiary was a corporation in Belize whose president was Philip Johnston, the Canadian attorney. “It just absolutely stunk all over the place,” says Terry Rich, chief executive of the Iowa Lottery. The Iowa attorney general’s office and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation opened a case.

In an interview in Quebec City, Johnston told investigators that he had been contacted about the ticket by a Houston attorney named Robert Sonfield. Johnston also pointed investigators toward a Sugar Land, Tex., businessman named Robert Rhodes. A trip to Texas by Iowa investigators proved fruitless; during their several days there, both Sonfield and Rhodes managed to avoid them.

By the time the file ended up on the desk of Rob Sand in 2014, the case had acquired cultlike status in his office. It was spoken about with gallows humor: “We’ll find the guy who bought the ticket ended up getting offed,” Sand said. “That’s what this is going to turn out to be, a murder case.”

Miller had mentored Sand and saw in him a kindred spirit, someone for whom practicing law was a calling. Sometimes Sand’s moral compass was so steady that he came off as a square; his brothers-in-law nicknamed him Baby Jesus. Sand grew up in Decorah, in northeast Iowa, the son of a small-town doctor who still made house calls. He wanted to get into white-collar criminal prosecution because it focused not on crimes of desperation but on crimes of greed. “Crimes against gratitude,” Sand called them.

But all he had was grainy video of a man buying a lottery ticket worth $16.5 million. “We only had one bullet left in our revolver,” Sand says, “and that was releasing the video.”

On Oct. 9, 2014, nearly 46 months after the man in the hoodie left the QuikTrip, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation put out a news release that included a link to a 74-second clip of the surveillance footage. A few days later, in Maine, an employee of the Maine Lottery opened an email forwarded from his boss. The employee recognized the distinct voice in the video: It belonged to a man who had spent a week in the Maine Lottery offices a few years earlier conducting a security audit.

In Des Moines, a web developer at the Iowa Lottery who watched the video also recognized that voice: It belonged to a man she had worked alongside for years. A receptionist in another lottery office handed her earbuds to Noelle Krueger, a draw manager, and told her to listen. “Why am I listening to a video or listening to a tape of Eddie?” Krueger replied.

By Eddie, she meant Eddie Tipton, the information-security director for the Multi-State Lottery Association. The organization runs lotteries for 33 different states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was based in the Des Moines suburbs. Among the games it ran was the Hot Lotto.

Eddie Tipton cut a big, friendly figure around the office of the Multi-State Lottery Association. He grew up in rural Texas, but while his siblings were outside, he was always in his room, fiddling with his computer. He was a paranoid sort who rarely paid with credit cards, who worried about people tracing his identity. But he always wanted people to like him. When a co-worker was in a bad mood, one colleague said, Tipton would pat him on the shoulder and say, “I just want you to know I’m your friend.”

Tipton built a 4,800-square-foot, $540,000 house in the cornfields south of Des Moines. The house had five bedrooms and a huge basement, including a pool table, a shuffleboard table, a stadium-style home theater with couches and a space he considered turning into a basketball court. Friends wondered why a single man needed such a big house and how he could afford it on a salary just shy of $100,000 a year. In private moments, Tipton told them he was lonely and wanted a family more than anything, so he poured his savings into the house he hoped to fill with a wife and children. But the right partner never came. Instead, he hosted office Christmas parties, and he constantly asked friends to visit. His family, still in Texas, checked on him frequently.

His life revolved around his job. The Multi-State Lottery Association was a small organization, and Tipton felt overextended. He wrote software and worked on web pages. He handled network security and firewalls. And he reviewed security for lottery games in nearly three dozen states. He was putting in 60-hour weeks and staying at the office until 11 p.m.

When Ed Stefan, the chief information officer and chief security officer at the Multi-State Lottery Association, saw the surveillance video, he didn’t want to believe it. This wasn’t just some co-worker. This was Eddie Tipton, a man he had known for more than two decades, since they were in calculus class at the University of Houston. Stefan met his future wife while he and Tipton were on a charity bike ride in Texas; Tipton would later be in their wedding. Stefan helped Tipton get his job at the association. They bought some 50 acres of land together and built adjacent houses. They even applied for a joint patent for computer-based lottery security.

Stefan watched the convenience-store video for the first time after a former co-worker sent him the link that had been released by prosecutors. That just can’t be Eddie, he thought. Then: That’s Eddie. Why is he wearing a hoodie? I’ve never seen Eddie in a hoodie. Stefan got sick to his stomach: His friend, a man with deep knowledge of the computers that ran the lottery, was there onscreen buying a ticket that would be worth $16.5 million. Later, Stefan would tell investigators it was like finding out your mother was an ax murderer. He felt betrayed.

Jason Maher was another friend and colleague who didn’t want to believe what he was seeing on the video. He and Tipton had met at Taki, a Japanese restaurant outside Des Moines that they both frequented. The lifelong computer aficionados and gamers hit it off; Tipton joined Maher’s gaming clan, and they spent hours playing the multiplayer online game World of Tanks. Tipton suggested Maher apply for a job at the lottery association as a network engineer. Tipton, Maher told me, “had a heart of gold.”

So when Maher saw the video and heard that familiar low-pitched voice, he did what a computer whiz does. “That night I sat down — there’s no way Eddie did this,” Maher said. “There’s got to be something wrong.” He put the file of the surveillance tape into audio software, removed white noise and isolated the voice. Then he took footage from security cameras in his house — Tipton had just visited the night before — and compared Tipton’s voice in that footage with the convenience-store video. “It was a complete and utter match, sound wave and everything,” Maher said. The next day, he went to the QuikTrip where the ticket was purchased and measured the dimensions of the tiles on the floor, the height of the shelving units, the distance between the door and the cash register. He used the results to compare the hand size, foot size and height of the man in the video with the man he had become friends with.

“When the F.B.I. guys came in, I wanted to be able to tell them it wasn’t Eddie,” Maher said. “Once I did this, it was like, ‘Well, [expletive] — it’s Eddie.’ ”

In November 2014, state investigators showed up at Tipton’s office. They asked him whom he knew in Houston. He told them about his family — mother, sister and brothers, including Tommy, a former sheriff’s deputy turned justice of the peace near the Texas Hill Country. He did not mention Robert Rhodes, the man who initially passed the $16.5 million ticket to an attorney. By searching Tipton’s LinkedIn profile, investigators found that Tipton had been employed at Rhodes’s Texas-based software company, Systems Evolution, for six years as its chief operations officer. In fact, the two were best friends and vacationed together.

Tipton was arrested in January 2015 and charged with two felony counts of fraud. Half a year later, on a hot, sticky July morning, Rob Sand stood before a jury at the Polk County Courthouse. “This is a classic story about an inside job,” he began. “A man who by virtue of his employment is not allowed to play the lottery, nor allowed to win, buys a lottery ticket, wins and passes the ticket along to friends to be claimed by someone unconnected to him. This story, though, has a 21st-century twist.”

The prosecution knew Tipton had bought the winning ticket. The video, specifically the distinct voice that colleagues had recognized, made that pretty clear. So did cellphone records, which showed Tipton was in town that day, not out of town for the holidays as he claimed, and that he had been on the phone for 71 minutes with Robert Rhodes, the man who briefly had possession of the ticket. Investigators believed he’d fixed the lottery. But how?

Jason Maher, Tipton’s gaming buddy, told them about Tipton’s interest in rootkits: malicious software that can be installed via flash drive in order to take control of a computer while masking its existence until it deletes itself later. Sand theorized that Tipton went into the draw room six weeks before the big jackpot and, despite the presence of two colleagues, managed to insert a thumb drive into one of the two computers that select the winning numbers. That thumb drive contained the rootkit; the rootkit allowed Tipton to direct which numbers would win the Hot Lotto on Dec. 29, 2010.

Tipton’s defense attorney, Dean Stowers, called this the “Mission: Impossible” theory. Stowers characterized the story of a malicious, self-destructing rootkit (“magic software”), installed while two colleagues looked on, as preposterous. His closing arguments referenced a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein: “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere.”

But Sand called Stowers’s focus on this complicated rootkit theory a red herring. Sand told the jury to focus on the many ways Tipton could have fixed the lottery: He wrote the code. He had access to the random-number-generator machines before they were shipped to other states. You don’t have to understand the exact technology to convict Tipton, Sand argued; you just have to realize the near-impossible coincidence of the lottery security chief’s buying a winning ticket and that ticket’s being passed to his best friend. The prosecution had to prove only that Tipton tried to illegally buy lottery tickets as a Multi-State Lottery Association employee and tried to claim the prize through fraudulent means.

The jury found him guilty on July 20, 2015. He would be sentenced to 10 years in prison, and he would appeal. The State Supreme Court later dismissed his conviction on one charge, tampering with lottery equipment, and the case was sent back to District Court.

Six weeks after the trial concluded, Sand had returned to his desk. It had been a busy summer. But in the back of his mind, he was still thinking about Eddie Tipton. Sand knew white-collar criminals aren’t usually caught on their first attempt. The fact that Tipton’s attorney had demanded a 90-day speedy trial, an unusual maneuver that cut short the prosecution’s time to investigate, made Sand suspicious. His gut said other fraudulent lottery tickets were out there.

One morning Sand’s office phone rang, and an area code he recognized popped up: 281, from Texas, where Tipton used to live. Sand picked up. The caller had a drawl and told Sand he’d seen an article in the La Grange, Tex., newspaper about Tipton’s conviction. “Did y’all know,” the tipster asked, “that Eddie’s brother Tommy Tipton won the lottery, maybe about 10 years back?”

Richard Rennison’s phone rang at the F.B.I. office in Texas City, a port town on the shore of Galveston Bay. Sand was on the line, inquiring about a case that Rennison, a special agent for the bureau, investigated a decade before. At the time, it turned out to be nothing. But the case still stuck in Rennison’s mind. “Hey,” Rennison replied, “that’s my Bigfoot case.”

A man named Tom Bargas had contacted local law-enforcement authorities in early 2006 with a suspicious story. Bargas owned 44 fireworks stands in Texas. Twice a year — after the Fourth of July and after New Year’s — he had to handle enormous amounts of cash, more than a half-million dollars at once. A local justice of the peace who shod Bargas’s horses called him around New Year’s. The justice of the peace caught Bargas off guard: “I got half a million in cash that I want to swap with your money.” “What’s wrong with your money?” Bargas replied.

What’s a justice of the peace who makes around $35,000 a year doing with that much cash? Bargas thought. He called the sheriff and the police, who called the F.B.I. Soon, the bureau contacted Bargas. Federal agents outfitted him with a wire. Bargas met with the man, who pulled out a briefcase filled with $450,000 in cash, still in their Federal Reserve wrappers. As the F.B.I. listened, Bargas swapped $100,000 of worn, circulated bills for $100,000 of the man’s crisp, unused bills. To the F.B.I., this smelled like public corruption, and they went to work investigating the serial numbers on the bills.

One day a couple of months later, Rennison got a call from the Fayette County sheriff in La Grange, a place best known for the Chicken Ranch, the brothel that inspired “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” The sheriff was laughing so hard he could hardly speak. He told Rennison the justice of the peace was holed up in a Houston hospital with two shattered legs. He had fallen 31 feet out of a tree. He had been hunting Bigfoot.

“My grandmother was raised on a farm in Arkansas where this creature would come in and harass all the farm animals,” this man later told investigators. “My grandmother would tell me all these stories of this animal that harassed my family.” He went on: “I started hitting the woods. It was always that doubt in your mind. And then something happened to me in Louisiana where I actually watched these animals for a couple of hours, and I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Rennison visited the man in the hospital and then set up an interview once he was discharged. The man was a member of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. He told Rennison he’d won the lottery in Colorado while on a Bigfoot hunt. He was on the outs with his wife and was trying to keep the lottery winnings from her. A Bigfoot-hunting friend claimed the prize in exchange for 10 percent of the money. It all checked out. Case closed.

“Right before I leave, we’re still sitting down at this nice conference table, and he looks over at his attorneys and says, ‘Can I show him?’ ” Rennison recalled. “Hanging off the back of his chair is a plastic grocery bag. He pulls out a plaster cast of a footprint.”

Rennison put the footprint next to his own foot. They were roughly the same size. “That doesn’t look like Bigfoot,” the F.B.I. agent said. “It was a juvenile,” the man snapped. The man’s name was Tommy Tipton.

Now the hunt was on for more illicitly claimed tickets. Iowa investigators noticed that the friend who claimed the $568,990 Colorado Lottery prize for Tommy Tipton, a man named Alexander Hicks, was dead. “We first thought, Whoa — this is our first body related to this case,” Sand says. It wasn’t. Hicks had died of cancer.

The investigators collected a decade’s worth of winners from lotteries around the country associated with the Multi-State Lottery Association. They loaded data from approximately 45,000 winning tickets into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and searched for any connections to Eddie Tipton. They reviewed Tipton’s Facebook friends, pulled phone records and looked for matches with the spreadsheet.

In September 2015, they learned that a $783,257.72 payout for Wisconsin’s Very Own Megabucks Game had been claimed in early 2008 by a Texas man named Robert Rhodes, who wanted to deposit it into the account of a limited-liability corporation. That drawing took place on Dec. 29, 2007 — the same day the winning numbers on Tipton’s $16.5 million Iowa ticket were selected three years later. Rhodes was Eddie Tipton’s best friend. Another hit.

One evening over the holidays, Sand was at his parents’ house working on his laptop, sifting through records, using search commands on his computer again and again. He noticed that a Kyle Conn from Hemphill, Tex., won a $644,478 jackpot in the Oklahoma Lottery some years back. Tommy Tipton had three Facebook friends named Conn. Sand got a list of possible phone numbers for a Kyle Conn and cross-referenced them with Tommy Tipton’s cellphone records. Another hit.

Investigators noticed two winning Kansas Lottery tickets for $15,402 apiece were purchased on Dec. 23, 2010 — the same day Tipton had purchased the Iowa ticket, and the same day that cellphone records indicated he was driving through Kansas on the way to Texas for the holidays. One of the winning tickets was claimed by a Texan named Christopher McCoulskey, the other by an Iowa woman named Amy Warrick. Each was a friend of Eddie Tipton’s.

Early one morning, Sand and an investigator knocked on the woman’s door. She told them she’d gone on one date with Tipton, but their relationship became platonic. Tipton told her he wasn’t able to claim a winning lottery ticket because of his job. If she could claim it, Tipton said, she could keep a significant portion as a gift for her recent engagement.

“You have these honest dupes,” Sand says. “All these people are being offered thousands of dollars for doing something that’s a little bit sneaky but not illegal.” Investigators in Iowa now had six tickets they figured were part of a bigger scam. But the question remained: How did it work ?

Investigators in Wisconsin discovered they still had the random-number-generator computers used for the 2007 jackpot sitting in storage. Unlike Iowa’s computers, the hard drives had not been wiped clean; their software was the same as the day Robert Rhodes won $783,257.72. Wisconsin enlisted a computer expert named Sean McLinden to conduct an investigation that included forensic analysis and reverse engineering.

On Jan. 7, 2016, Sand’s phone rang. It was David Maas, an assistant attorney general in Wisconsin. He told Sand to check his email. Maas had sent him an attachment with 21 lines of “pseudocode,” a common-language translation of McLinden’s forensic analysis that showed part of Tipton’s malicious computer code. The code was small enough that it would not radically change the size of the file, which might create suspicion. And the code hadn’t been hidden. You just needed to know what to look for.

“This,” Maas says, “was finding the smoking gun.”

The smoking gun would help lead to a guilty plea from Tipton. In the plea deal, Sand insisted that Tipton come clean about how he fixed the lottery. This could help the lottery industry improve its security. If Tipton lied — or if another fraudulent ticket were found later — the deal would be voided, and Tipton would be subject to further charges.

Tipton’s program was called QVRNG.dll: Quantum Vision Random Number Generator. In Tipton’s telling, his wasn’t an evil plan to get rich. This was just a computer nerd’s attempt to crack the system. “It was never my intent to start a full-out ticket scam,” Tipton told investigators. “It occurred to me, like, Wow, I could do this, I could be making a living doing this.” He went on: “If this was, like, some mob-related thing, I’d just give this information to the mob and they would go out and win the lotteries left and right. Nobody would know. But that — I don’t have any mob ties. I don’t know anybody. I gave tickets to friends or family.”

More than a decade ago, Tipton told them, he walked past one of the organization’s accountants at the Multi-State Lottery Association. Tipton was conservative, the accountant liberal, and they often ribbed each other.

“Hey, did you put your secret numbers in there?” the accountant said, teasing Tipton.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, you can set numbers on any given day since you wrote the software.”

And that’s when the idea first came. “Just like a little seed that was planted,” Tipton said in his proffer. “And then during one slow period I just had a — had a thought that it’s possible, and I tried it and I put it in.” The code wasn’t a brazen “Mission: Impossible” stunt of sneaking into the draw room with a malicious thumb drive. It was a simple piece of code, partly copied from an internet source, inserted by the one man responsible for information security at an organization that runs three dozen United States lotteries.

Here’s how the Multi-State Lottery Association’s random-number generators were supposed to work: The computer takes a reading from a Geiger counter that measures radiation in the surrounding air, specifically the radioactive isotope Americium-241. The reading is expressed as a long number of code; that number gives the generator its true randomness. The random number is called the seed, and the seed is plugged into the algorithm, a pseudorandom number generator called the Mersenne Twister. At the end, the computer spits out the winning lottery numbers.

Tipton’s extra lines of code first checked to see if the coming lottery drawing fulfilled Tipton’s narrow circumstances. It had to be on a Wednesday or a Saturday evening, and one of three dates in a nonleap year: the 147th day of the year (May 27), the 327th day (Nov. 23) or the 363rd day (Dec. 29). Investigators noticed those dates generally fell around holidays — Memorial Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas — when Tipton was often on vacation. If those criteria were satisfied, the random-number generator was diverted to a different track. Instead, the algorithm would use a predetermined seed number that restricted the pool of potential winning numbers to a much smaller, predictable set of numbers.

So Tipton knew what no one else knew: For the Iowa Hot Lotto drawing on Dec. 29, 2010, there weren’t really 10,939,383 sets of possible winning numbers. There were only a few hundred. Late at night before a draw that fulfilled his criteria, Tipton stayed in his messy, computer-filled office. He set a test computer to the date and time of the coming draw, and he ran the program over and over again. For the first lottery he rigged, the Nov. 23, 2005, drawing in Colorado, Tipton wrote down each potential set of winning numbers on a yellow legal pad. He handed the pad — each sheet had 35 or so sets of six numbers — to his brother.

It was a cheat sheet; instead of playing every possible number combination to ensure one combination won, he had to play only a few hundred. “If you want a chance to win, you need to play all of these,” Tipton told his brother. “I don’t know if any of them will win, but you’re going anyway” — his brother was about to go on a Bigfoot-hunting trip to Colorado — and “these have a good chance of winning based on my analysis.

“Play them,” he said. “Play them all.”

On a clear, blue summer day in Des Moines last year, Eddie Tipton, a square-shaped, balding man who was then 54, trudged up the stairs of the Polk County Courthouse. He wore bluejeans and a short-sleeved salmon-colored button-up shirt, untucked and unbuttoned, with a blue T-shirt underneath. His hands were shoved in his pockets, and his head was down. He had accepted a plea agreement for masterminding the largest lottery scam in American history: one count of ongoing criminal conduct, part of a package deal that allowed his brother to be sentenced to only 75 days. Tipton was here for his sentencing.

In statements to prosecutors, Tipton painted himself in the most generous way possible, a kind of coding Robin Hood, stealing from the lottery and helping people in need: his brother who had five daughters, his friend who’d just gotten engaged. “I didn’t really need the money,” Tipton said. The judge noted that Tipton seemed to rationalize his actions — that Tipton didn’t think it was necessarily illegal, just a taking advantage of a hole in the lottery’s system. It wasn’t all that different, Tipton believed, from insider trading, except laws didn’t specifically prohibit him from fiddling with the random-number-generator code. His attorney equated what he did with counting cards at a casino. Tipton wasn’t robbing the casino at gunpoint; he was cheating the house.

The other side disagreed. Tipton was “nothing but a common thief who happened to be handed the keys to the candy store,” Miller, Sand’s former boss, told me. “It’s not a case of Sherlock Holmes’s archnemesis, Moriarty, being a criminal genius. This is just a regular schlub, who is a thief who happens to have knowledge of computer security.”

From Tipton’s point of view, it was complicated. He had done something to see if he could do it. To his surprise, it worked. He said he inserted that code only once; after the code was approved by Gaming Laboratories International, machines containing it were shipped all over the country. He had created a beast and sent it into the world. “You plant that money tree in your backyard,” as Maas, the Wisconsin prosecutor, put it, “and it’s hard not to keep picking at it.”

In interviews, investigators had asked Tipton if he was proud of the success of his code. “It was more like I’m ready for it to be gone,” Tipton said. “It was never my intent to go out there and start winning all these lotteries. It was just, like I said, step by step it happened.”

At sentencing, the judge asked if Tipton had anything to say. After a long pause, Tipton cleared his throat. Family members and former co-workers were in the courtroom. “Well,” Tipton said matter-of-factly, “I certainly regret my actions. It’s difficult to say that with all the people behind me that I hurt. And I regret it. I’m sorry.” As the case was being litigated, Tipton had confessed to friends that he was racked with guilt. At another point during the proceedings, Tipton leaned across a divide and extended his hand to Sand. Sand took the handshake as a sign of respect, as if Tipton had thought he outsmarted the system but the system figured him out. On the day of his sentencing, Tipton told the judge he’d been taking classes to go into ministry. A deputy placed Tipton in handcuffs and led him away.

Earlier in the summer, Tipton sat in a conference room with Sand and law-enforcement and lottery officials to give his full confession, as promised in his plea agreement. Eventually he would head to Clarinda Correctional Facility in southern Iowa, near the Missouri border, where he remains today, Offender No. 6832975. (Through his attorney, he declined interview requests for this article; Tipton did not respond to nearly a dozen emails through the prison email system.)

During a lunch break in Tipton’s hourslong confession, Sand and others involved in the prosecution walked a few blocks to the High Life Lounge. They ordered bacon-wrapped tater tots to celebrate. “Eddie sees himself as much brighter than the rest of the world, the sharpest tool in the toolbox,” Sand says. “It’s the kind of thing I see in white-collar case after white-collar case, people who think they’re better than everybody else, that people trust them and love them, and that no one will be able to figure this out.”

The judge sentenced Tipton to a maximum of 25 years in prison. His restitution payments to the various state lotteries came to $2.2 million even though, according to his attorney, Tipton pocketed only around $350,000 from the scam, the rest going to those who claimed the tickets. (Prosecutors did not believe that, pointing to Tipton’s massive house as well as the fact that Tipton and his brother owned 11 pieces of property either jointly or individually in Fayette County, Tex.) In Iowa, which has indeterminate sentencing, a 25-year sentence could mean Tipton is released much sooner; Sand expects Tipton to be released by the Iowa Board of Parole within seven years.

Sand says he felt a deep intellectual satisfaction in solving the puzzle: “The justice system at its best is really about a search for truth.” But it couldn’t go back in time and correct wrongs. At the end of this yearslong case, he came to a realization: He had grown weary of dealing with criminals. “In so much darkness,” Sand says, “I started to lose my light.”

A few months after the highest-profile case of his career, Sand went up to his boss and quit. He had decided to run for state auditor in the coming November election, so he could make positive changes. If he wins, he will be investigating government waste, abuse and fraud. “There’s no way I would make a move to get away from the darkness of prosecution without finishing this case first,” Sand says. “So finishing it, to me, was not merely satisfying. It was liberating.”

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Reid Forgrave is a writer based in Minnesota. He last wrote for the magazine about the fight over proposed mines near the Boundary Waters .

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Why some Jamaican kids want to grow up to be lottery scammers

• By David Leveille

Corporal Kevin Watson of Jamaica's Major Organized Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency talks with students during a lottery scamming prevention campaign in Jamaican schools.

Imagine you get a call saying you've won a lottery worth several million dollars. All you has to do is pay some fees and expenses and the money is yours. Sounds good, right?

It must, because scammers in Jamaica have used that lie to extort millions of dollars from unsuspecting marks. They're such a growth industry that Kevin Watson, an investigator with Jamaica's Major Organized Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency, recently found something stunning when he visited a school to warn kids off the scheme: In one classroom of 38 schoolchildren, 17 kids said they wanted to be lottery scammers.

“I spoke with two little boys, two students, who said they wanted to become scammers,” Watson says, “They said, 'Well, sir, we see scammers driving nice cars, and they have big houses and they wear nice clothes and party, and that's what we want.' I think young, impressionable minds like this now see this as a really easy way to make money.”

So what can you tell kids who aspire to be con men instead of doctors, lawyers or even Olympic sprinters?

“I tell them that lottery scamming is wrong. It's a crime. It’s against the laws of Jamaica," Watson says. "I just let them know that the best way is to get a sound education and get a job, a legitimate job.”

But that can be a tough sell in Jamaica, where the World Bank says the unemployment rate is above 13 percent — and perhaps twice that for young people. Meanwhile, scammers are so rich that they've generated some off-the-wall stories about their lifestyles. One suggests they wash their cars with champagne; another says they have contests to see who can set the most money on fire.

“Lottery scammers are usually very flamboyant,” Watson says. “Some of these guys just left high school and find themselves with a large sum of money that they have scammed off these victims, and so I guess they just want to show they're living the high life, living like a rock star.”

Not all of them stay lucky: One scammer named Sanjay Williams was caught thanks to a suspicious would-be victim in Bismarck, North Dakota, who tipped off the police. Williams is now on trial for conspiracy and wire fraud, and Watson is in North Dakota providing testimony. The trial gave him the opportunity to meet some of the scamming victims face-to-face.

“It was heartbreaking, eye-opening to meet the victims testifying about how they’ve been scammed," he says. "Some of these victims are really old, it really touches my heart, and makes it worthwhile for me to fight this even more.”

And as the jury considers Williams' fate — and Jamaican media cover the trial — Watson is hopeful that the anti-scamming message will get through to Jamaican schoolchildren.

“I definitely feel like we're making progress at this," he says. "The trial in Bismarck, North Dakota, can lead to a revolution in how we handle these matters. This will definitely scare people [away] from getting involved.”  

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Jamaican lottery scamming no substitute for reparations

• November 22, 2017
• By Erica Browne

Jovan Lewis, an assistant professor of Geography and African American Studies at UC Berkeley, gave a talk on November 17 titled "Reparations, Deferral, and the Promissory of Poverty" as part of the Haas Institute's Research to Impact speaker series.

Lewis began by acknowledging the unique opportunity to make anthropology more responsible for theorizing poverty, an opportunity, in part, created by the interdisciplinary research focus of the Haas Institute. Here, he described his work as bringing an economic anthropology background, and theories of “reciprocity” and “economics of exchange,” to study Jamaican poverty.

The landscape of Jamaican poverty and the everyday experience of economic deprivation and sufferation, provide the backdrop against which lottery scamming is presented as a critical register of the Black diasporic political economy. Lottery scamming—an intricate criminal activity where contact information lists are purchased and used to extort money—can also be understood as the rationalization of crime as part of the Black experience of navigating poverty.

In the context of sufferation, the Black urban poor respond to poverty through lottery scamming, which serves as a type of reparations for post-colonial exploitation. According to Lewis, reparations are conceived, and sought, as a novel form of reciprocity.

Scammers endeavor to take reparations, and the force of taking creates a “transferability of debt through whiteness.” Central to the lottery scamming as reparations scheme are “crews,” groups of young men who work together, and often meet through the Jamaican school system, engage in casual labor, and live with family within the same poor neighborhoods, like St. James Parish and the Elizabeth Commons public housing.

The economic contours of these neighborhoods, having been shaped by urban renewal policies of the 1980’s, create a figurative culture of poverty that limits social mobility and economic opportunity. Often denied access to viable economic mobility opportunities, “crews” engage in a series of steps to secure economic opportunity through lottery scamming: they acquire data, engage in direct and sustained phone communication with victims, and collect money in increasingly negative ways amid increased scrutiny.

Decades of failed government development, abuses of economic social justice, and a development structure of exclusion produces scamming as a viable means for attaining the economic opportunity and financial resources that might not otherwise be attained.

Parallel to the lottery scamming of Jamaican crews, the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice, is presented as another claim for reparatory justice, albeit one that makes direct evidentiary claims to reparations for slavery and its postcolonial effects.

The radical requests and demands made by the Caribbean governments to various European governments connects the colonized and colonizer, and acknowledges the colonial reciprocal obligation of reparations as a transaction reconsidered in the context of slavery.

Lewis describes the anticipated repayment of debt maintaining a contemporary colonial relationship and, in the absence of economic recompensation, it enables for a moral recompensation. Slavery, therefore, is recast as both a theft and a gift, and the transaction upon which a claim for reparations is made.

Lottery scamming is also recast, from a form of theft and criminal activity, into a form of reparation for contemporary American exploitation via its tourism and corporatization of Jamaica. Jovan Lewis describes an important “historization” that skips across Great Britain’s transgressions towards Jamaica, and focuses on America as being responsible for the contemporary economic and social oppression in Jamaica.

For the lottery scammers, a conflation of race and whiteness renders the British and Americans as being “the same white people,” and scamming becomes a justified form of repayment for colonial and postcolonial exploitation. However, within this context, the lack of fiduciary responsibility for poverty results in the ongoing deferral of reparative debt.

In concluding his talk, Lewis describes a “geography of suspension” where both lottery scamming crews, and Caribbean nations, engage in an uneven and unequal compensation sufferation, awaiting the repayment of debt.

The poverty they experience serves as a suspended deferral, and a reminder of the need to maintain patience and a relationship through deferral for any hope of economic recompensation.

Jovan Scott Lewis is an economic anthropologist who works in the field sites of Tulsa, Oklahoma and Montego Bay, Jamaica. His research examines the cultural mechanisms, institutional forms, and social practices through which an unequal living of, and coping with, the economy, its failures and contingencies are understood. Central to this inquiry is an exploration of contemporary inequality, which supports a generative definition of the economy in which poverty and race informs its articulation and spatial organization. Working between the US and the Caribbean, Jovan’s research endeavors toward an understanding of the political economy of inequality and race within the black diaspora.

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review

• Journal of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Criminal Repair in the Jamaican Lotto Scam

By Jovan Lewis

Emergent Conversation 10

A special series of essays, On Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism

Street scene of a man waiting in line at a money transfer shop in London . By Alistair MacRobert .

In 2003, Jamaica liberalized its telecommunications industry, opening the way for multiple telecoms companies to compete in the Jamaican market, which was quickly adopting a variety of internet technologies as part of everyday communication. Limited mobile phone and internet café use gave way to the widespread adoption of smartphones and in-home internet. British-owned Cable and Wireless, which long held a monopoly in the country, was surpassed by Irish-owned Digicel, whose Caribbean footprint grew exponentially over those early years. The liberalization of the industry also spurred the incentivization of the nearshore Business Process Outsourcing industry to the country. Located in Jamaica’s primary Free Trade Zone in Montego Bay, several companies arrived offering data and customer service services for companies like Amazon. The call centers would soon come to compete closely with the historical tourist industry in dominating the local economy of Montego Bay, as scores of young Jamaicans competed for these white-collar jobs. With low wages and high attrition, frustration, if not dismay, would come to characterize call center work. But within those circumstances, a new opportunity would present itself.

With access to the contact details of thousands of US-based customers and having learned the art of “customer service,” the “lottery scam” would prove the industry to be profitable after all. While many theorize that the practice was initially a secret of the city’s upper-class elite, it eventually spread throughout Montego Bay’s poor garrison communities—poor neighborhoods, typically controlled by a local don, or gang leader. The scam would ultimately become a radical means of accumulation. Scammers mainly targeted vulnerable White American senior citizens, promising them various awards from cash to cars. Like the young men I discuss in my book, Scammer’s Yard , some scammer crews used a sophisticated form of credit relations, telling their victims that they had been overcharged through a miscalculation of their credit card’s APR, and in order to receive the refund, they would have to pay a processing fee. These fees were collected through money transfer service providers on the island such as Western Union and MoneyGram. Working with the crew, which was comprised of three young and poor men, I wanted to understand the moral framework by which they could justify or make sense of their participation in the scam. I was surprised when, inspired by a then-current and popular song by dancehall artist Vybz Kartel, [1] they argued that the scam was a form of reparations.

Reparative Refusal

“ Street in Montego Bay Jamaica .” Photo by D Ramey Logan . From Wikimedia Commons by D Ramey Logan. CC-BY-SA 3.0 .

The crew’s reparative justification was very obviously convenient. However, given that they were able to articulate a reparative rationale to my request for explanation, I had no choice but to take that justification seriously. For the crew, the reparations they claimed from their victims had very little to do with the normative bases on which reparations were based. Rather than  situating reparations within an argument about slavery, they viewed reparations as an explicitly contemporary concern. The contemporary poverty that they experienced, and used the scam to escape, was more meaningful and identifiable than the injury of slavery. In this way, the crew departed from the global question of reparations that was taking place across the formerly colonized world.

But choosing to take the claim as a valid one, valid because it was born out of the genuine circumstance of intergenerational and structural postcolonial poverty, one sees how the scammer framework would serve that global project of reparation and not undermine it. This service is so because the scammer claim did much to disrupt the usual discursive hindrances to reparative claims, namely recognizing deserving victims and, critically, identifying complicit and guilty parties. In taking this approach, scammers engage in what David Scott (1999) calls the (Jamaican) rudeboy’s “refusal.” He argues that this form of refusal recognizes the unattractiveness, if not expiration, of “the old options” of liberal, progressive rationality.

Predominant reparative frameworks are born out of this rationale (Scott 1999, 215). The refusal is paired with a form of self-fashioning produced by vernacular articulations that resist emancipatory ethics. This move frees the rudeboy from being bound by liberal, respectable representational politics. Moreover, the scammer embodying this rudeboy refusal is able to expand beyond the respectability underpinning the reparative frameworks and proposals from reparations leaders and programs. Those frameworks demand a collectivist mode of recognition that can simultaneously reflect the scales of injury and of recompense. An example is the platform of the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC). The CRC, invested in the post-independence structure of “development,” advances a program that seeks reparations for the various social ills and structural disinvestment that the Caribbean regions have endured since slavery. These consequences are framed as a collective grievance, with the collectivity of the claim demanding the integration and compliance of all claimants.

In part because of their criminality, scammers are discursively if not morally excluded from respectable integration. As such the scammer can prioritize his preferences and ambitions to shape a more honest and thus novel sense of repair, which is the capacity to accumulate. Accumulation as a reparative possibility is one that cannot accommodate a neat or scalable articulation. It is in this sense that the reparative claim, which is much less a claim than a demand, must be understood. Reparations, as organized on a collectivist basis, requires the ability to accommodate a multiplicity of parties and a diversity of members. The scammer demand forgoes the complications of that accommodation by levying the injury as held by the Black individual as valid enough, and weighty enough, without concern for recognition, because repair is not given, but taken as reparations. The scam, therefore, qualifies as reparation simply because the scammer says so. Herein lies one of the most central challenges of any reparations program: the ability to argue for the validity of the claim. The scammer refuses to argue, and moreover, refuses to concede to the requirement of validation. By sitting out and outside the normative demands of recognition, the scammer rationale enables the scam to be interpreted as a legitimate form of reparations.

Spatializing Debt

Montego Bay, Jamaica. Couple having drinks at the pool. Getty Images.

Through refusal, scammers prioritize a temporal shift away from the history of slavery to the contemporary experience of poverty. The scam’s reparative formulary is radical because it “mobilizes a reparative logic capable of reformulating the sites and perpetrators of postcolonial transgression in a manner that stretches and bends the conventional history of colonial exploitation” (Lewis 2020, 23). The reformulation is possible, however, explicitly because of the spatial and racial negotiations of scammer recognition. When answering my question of how they could think that scamming North Americans could pay the reparative debts earned by the centuries of British slavery and colonialism, one member of the crew replied in turn with a question: “Aren’t they the same White people?”  By reconfiguring time as a reparative marker, this crew member had brought up something unexpected, but unmistakable. Indeed, they were likely the same “kind” of White people, if we overgeneralize Anglo influence in the United States’ formation, but they were different because of their colonial pasts. Lumping both Britons and Americans together was semiotic maneuvering that accounted for a long history of Jamaican experience in which the British and then Americans functioned in the same capacity. If the British once had Jamaicans work the plantations, the Americans now have them work hotels and call centers that trap them in cycles of poverty. Beyond that, but perhaps as witnessed in these latter spaces, it was evident to them that the United States held the most viable, accessible, and profitable purses that could provide the quantity of reparations that they were after.

Again, through refusal, the crew radically redefined the normative geographic delimitations of reparative blame, and in the process uncovered, or made bare and apprehensible the true interconnected, globally conspiratorial crime of western development. In other words, there was not just one guilty party; it was every party that participated and then benefited from their current poverty and the system that produced it. The rationale is a demonstration of the “disjuncture between the misery and hardships of [Jamaicans’] lived experience on the island and the imagined experience of participating in the material well-being of America” (Gray 2004, 100). As I write in Scammer’s Yard , the scammers produce an accounting “that skips across time and geography to transform Britain’s transgression into the United States’ is a genealogy that can be traced through the postcolonial custodianship of Jamaican exploitation, which has changed hands over the decades with the reorientation of British-Jamaican trade and political relations to that of Jamaica and the United States” (Lewis 2020,158). As a result of this exploding of the geographic remit of injury and responsibility, scammers offer novel and capacious terms of transgression. The mobility of transgression is made possible by a sophisticated capacity to trace colonial debt across both time and space.  

Race, Fungibility, and Repair

Reparative debt, and specifically its mobility, is made apprehensible because of the debt’s core racial capitalist foundation in Whiteness. This Whiteness, the kind that is the same between British colonials and the middle-class North Americans that scammers target, “serves as a mode, or function, of inequality and thus offers a steady marker of blame across its permutations and exchanges” (Lewis 2020,159). The transferability of debt is facilitated by the operation of Whiteness as an object that is overrepresented, to draw on Sylvia Wynter’s determination of Western hegemonic formation. Therefore, the White Western project’s geographic scale and scope have meant that its overrepresentation can be manipulated wherever it is most vulnerable. This is the sophistication of the scammer’s reparative project, and it succeeds, to use a generous term, where most conventional reparations programs fail. As discussed by previous pieces in this series, the CARICOM Reparations Committee struggles because it has made its argument and taken its claim to the most impenetrable and intractable site of the Western project: the state. For scammer logic, which recognizes the subjective flattening that makes racialization possible, the White state is no different or less complicit than the State’s White subjects. And here is where the convenience of the scammer notion of repair demonstrates its genius.

With this approach, the scam “broadens the ability for claims to be made at a growing scale charted along the tangled path of relations made through globalization and the compounding of injustices carried forward by neoliberal economic policy” (Lewis 2020, 159).

This move remedies the full depth of the colonial injury by recognizing the fungibility of Whiteness. This fungibility rearticulates Whiteness as a modality capable of carrying blame and holding it in sites that facilitate the most accessible claim-making for repair.  Fungible repair reconfigures the basis for repayment on the terms and the bases most suitable for its satisfaction, scammer satisfaction. Other, more conventional programs for reparation are hampered both materially, but more importantly, discursively, by fixed ideas of blame, which are rooted in a morality made by the colonial powers who inflicted their injuries. With a deft shifting of blame, scammers manipulate, through relocation, reparations’ relations and expectations. Their practice, therefore, eschews the need to be “made right” by the assertion and the acceptance of colonial wrongdoing.

‘Cane-Cutters in Jamaica’, 1891. From The Colonial Portfolio. [The Werner Company, London] Artist Unknown. Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images.

Set against the broader movement for reparations, which has over the past couple years seen growing political recognition, the scammer framework is unlikely to qualify as legitimate. The point here has not been to legitimize the scammer rationale, nor to endorse the criminal modality by which it is executed. The power and value of the scammer claim, however convenient, is that among the various reparations frameworks, it is the only articulation that centers the need to recognize the specific and personal ideals that constitute everyday experiences of life in the injury’s wake.

Moreover, emancipated from the expectations of both respectability and collectivity, the scammer reconfigures repair as the direct and undiluted satisfaction of those who carry the reparative claim. Through this reconfiguration, scammers upend conventional relations between North Atlantic powers by eschewing any expectation for mutuality, recognizing that the world as it is, by design, will never function on terms of equality. Thus, if not formally offered, reparations must be taken by any means necessary, as long as those means satisfy the individual’s pursuits, which unapologetically qualify as repair.

[1] Vybz Kartel, “Reparation (featuring Gaza Slim),” track 1 on Reparation, Adidjahiem Records, 2012.

Works Cited

Gray, Obika. 2004. Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor of Jamaica. Barbados: University of the West Indies Press.

Lewis, Jovan S. 2020. Scammers Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Scott, David. 1999. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality . Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257.

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U.S. Embassy in Jamaica

Lottery Scams

The American Citizen Services section in Kingston receives frequent inquiries from citizens who have been defrauded for hundreds and even thousands of dollars by Advance Fee Fraud scammers in Jamaica.  The most prevalent in Jamaica is the lottery scam, where scammers lead victims to believe they have won a drawing or lottery, but the cash or prizes will not be released without upfront payment of fees or taxes.  Scammers frequently target the elderly or those with disposable income.

If it is too good to be true, it is not true.  Do NOT believe that you have won a lottery you never entered.  It is illegal to play foreign lotteries from the United States.  Do NOT believe any offers (lottery, prize claim, inheritance, etc.) that require a fee to be paid up front.  Do NOT provide personal or financial information to individuals or businesses you don’t know or haven’t verified.  Do NOT send any money to someone you do not know.  Do NOT attempt to recover funds personally or travel to Jamaica to transfer money.

Check the following signs to see if you might be involved in a fraudulent lottery scheme:

• You receive an unsolicited call, letter or email claiming that you have won a lottery or contest you never entered or that other individuals or businesses entered for you, and that you must pay fees or taxes to claim the prize
• The caller indicates they are doing you a ‘service’ by allowing you to pay fees up front in order to avoid further hassles, taxes, paperwork, lawyers, etc.
• The caller provides stories explaining the urgent need for more money, and finds creative ways for you to obtain and send money, including using ‘Green Dot’ cards, selling property, taking loans, etc.
• A caller you do not know claims to know about your neighborhood, family, or personal situation
• If funds are not submitted, the scammers may feign anger or make threats.  Threats include claims that they will report you to the IRS, to the police, or cause bodily harm.
• Scammers may involve unwitting accomplices to contact you, including your friends, family, neighbors or local police
• Scammers may subsequently pose as government officials or lawyers claiming that you must pay for their services to assist with your case, reclaim your scammed funds, or protect you from criminal prosecution.  Although the caller may claim to be in Jamaica, he or she may ask that the money be sent to an account in another country or to an accomplice in the U.S.  Alternatively, the scammer may state he or she is in a third country but request that funds be sent to the Jamaica.

If you think you have been a victim of a lottery scam, speak up and  stop sending money .  Scammers are difficult to stop because most victims do not report the incident.  Report the matter immediately to the Federal Trade Commission at  http://www.ftc.gov/  and also the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership among the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BIA), at  www.ic3.gov.   You can also inform the U.S. Embassy in Kingston at  [email protected]  and contact the local police.   Stop all communication with the scammers  – if their calls do not stop, attempt to block their calls or consider changing your phone number.

Lottery Scam Resources

• Internet Crime Complaint Center:   www.ic3.gov
• Federal Trade Commission:   www.ftc.gov
• A  video  from London’s American Citizen Services section
• Department of State’s  International Financial Scams brochure

  Other Types of Scams

Additional scams originating in Jamaica include U.S. citizens defrauded by Internet contacts they thought were their friends or loved ones. These schemes include on-line dating services, inheritance notices, work permits/job offers, bank overpayments, non-existent BTA airline boarding fees, and even the appearance that you are helping a friend in trouble.

In many cases, scammers make phone calls or troll the Internet for victims, and spend weeks or months building a relationship. Once they have gained their victim’s trust, the scammers create a false situation and ask for money.

Before you send funds, check to see if you recognize any of the following signs, and realize that you may be a potential victim of a scam:

• You only know your friend or fiancé online and may never have met in person. In some cases, the victim has even believed he or she has married the scammer by proxy.
• Photographs of the scammer show a very attractive person, and appear to have been taken at a professional modeling agency or photo studio. If they provide you with a copy of their passport or visa, you can always contact the U.S. embassy in the country where the passport or visa was issued to verify the validity of the document.
• The scammer’s luck is incredibly bad – he/she is in a car crash, or arrested, or mugged, or beaten, or hospitalized. Close family members are dead or unable to assist. Sometimes, the scammer claims to have a young child overseas who is ill or hospitalized.
• You have sent money for visas or plane tickets but they can’t seem to make it to their destinations, citing detention by immigration officials, or other reasons that prevent them from traveling.
• Beware of anyone who requests funds for a BTA, or Basic Travel Allowance, as a requirement to depart another country for the United States. There is no such thing as a BTA. In other cases, your Internet friend will claim to need a travel allowance, or travel money, to be able to travel to the United States. Again, there is no such requirement under U.S. law.
• The scammer may even claim to be contacting you from a U.S. Embassy, where your partner, business associate, or friend is being detained pending payment of some type of fee. U.S. embassies do NOT detain people.

Internet scammers are using social networking sites to find victims. The scammers obtain a person’s login information, change his/her profile to make it appear as if the person is in trouble, then contact the person’s friends via those websites asking them to send money to help. To avoid falling victim to such a scam, always be suspicious of anyone asking for money through the Internet, including via social networking sites, and always verify a supposed friend’s circumstances by speaking to him or her directly. ALWAYS protect your online identity by securing your logins and passwords.

Adoption scams are becoming increasingly common. The perpetrators of child adoption fraud often claim to be indigent parents unable to care for a child or members of the clergy working at an orphanage seeking a good home for a child. Americans should be very cautious about sending money or traveling abroad to adopt a child from an orphanage they have only heard about through e-mails. A new twist in the conventional email adoption scam has appeared recently, and this one occurs after the victim discovers that he or she has been fooled by a scam. Once the victim suspects fraud and breaks off communications with the scammers, a new email message will arrive claiming to be from a police agency. These fictitious policemen will offer to recover the victim’s lost money. The scammers will then ask for a “refundable” fee to open the investigation or court files.

All of these scams have one thing in common – they contain requests for money.  Sometimes you are asked to pay money to obtain something of value for yourself (e.g. a prize, a romantic relationship, more money); or you are asked to pay money to help a friend in trouble. In every case, however, the  ultimate indicator of a scam is that you are always asked to give money .

Con artists can be very creative and very determined. Be skeptical. Do not send anyone money unless you are certain that it is a legitimate request – even if you think you know the person well based on your Internet correspondence. You are unlikely to be able to recover money lost in such scams. For more information, please see the Department of State’s brochure at  http://travel.state.gov/pdf/international_financial_scams_brochure.pdf  (PDF 654 KB).

If you believe you are the victim of an Internet scam:

• Do not send money. Unfortunately, any money that you might already have sent will probably not be recoverable.
• End all communication with the scammer immediately, rather than attempt resolution directly. If you feel threatened, contact your local police at once. Do NOT attempt to personally recover the funds lost. Contact the appropriate authorities to resolve the matter.
• Report the matter immediately to The Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership among the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BIA), at  www.ic3.gov .
• If the scam originated through a particular website, notify the administrators of that website.

The latest Department of State travel updates and guidance on travel.state.gov .

• Smart Traveler Enrollment Program The Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) is a free service to allow U.S. citizens and nationals traveling and living abroad to enroll their trip with the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate. Enroll Now
• Looking for the nearest embassy or consulate? Visit the official list of embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions from the U.S. Department of State. Find the nearest Embassy or Consulate
• Coronavirus.gov A portal for public information that is curated by the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Task Force at the White House, working in conjunction with CDC, HHS and other agency stakeholders. Visit Coronavirus.gov .

Have an emergency?

• Contact your nearest embassy or call 1-888-407-4747 (U.S./Canada) or +1-202-501-4444 (overseas)
• Contact the nearest Embassy or Consulate
• Enroll for Alerts

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) landing page on CDC.gov is the latest public health and safety information from CDC and for the overarching medical and health provider community on COVID-19. Visit CDC Covid-19 Page

Visit the official list of embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions from the U.S. Department of State.

The Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) is a free service to allow U.S. citizens and nationals traveling and living abroad to enroll their trip with the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate.     Enroll Now

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Lottery Scams: What They Are and How To Avoid Them

The lottery is fun to play, but scammers use it to their advantage. Learn how to spot a scam, how to avoid them, and how to report them.

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You’re probably used to getting email, phone, telemarketing, and other common scams daily. And while these scams are among the most common, don’t let them distract from the fact that scams are everywhere.

Some might argue that playing the lottery is a scam in and of itself (considering the chances of winning are so low). But actual lottery scams are common — affecting more people now than ever.

Learn how to spot common lottery scams and what you can do to protect yourself the next time you buy that Mega Millions ticket.

What Are Lottery Scams?

Lottery scams are a tactic that criminals use to try to gain access to your personal information, banking, and monetary amount info in particular. Lottery scams can take a few different forms, but one of the most common is a sweepstakes scam.

With these, scammers might claim that you’ve won a random drawing for a certain amount of prize money. They might claim that you’re a lottery winner, even if you haven’t entered a lottery at any given point in the first place. Sweepstake scams might also lure you with a physical prize, like a new car or shares of a vacation property.

Con artists and fraudsters also commonly pawn fake or expired lottery tickets for a “discounted” price to get your cash. This is another less common form of lottery scamming, but still one to look out for.

What Are Some Signs of a Scam?

There are usually three indicators that can make it clear whether you’re dealing with a legitimate or a fake lottery. These include:

• Requiring payment for your prize: Real prizes are free and do not require you to make  a down payment or a payment for “shipping and handling.” If an individual asks you to pay processing fees to claim a prize, don’t do it — especially over wire transfer or through gift cards. This makes it harder for FBI personnel to track where the money went.
• Requiring financial information: No legitimate lottery or sweepstakes will ever ask for your bank account numbers or credit card numbers to claim a prize. If anyone asks for this information, it is a scam.
• They say paying increases your odds of winning: Real sweepstakes are free, and winning is entirely by luck. Only a scammer would ask you to pay to increase your odds of winning a prize — as this practice is illegal for legitimate sweepstakes and lottery games.

What Are Some Ways Scammers Trick You?

Scammers use many different tactics to get you to give them the information they’re getting at. Don’t fall for their tricks:

Using Recognizable Names and Organizations 

Talented scammers are likely to pretend to be government organizations or other groups that seem reputable. Often, they have apparently official websites (which, in reality, are fake) to add credibility to their scheme. However, no real lottery or sweepstakes will ever contact you directly to claim a prize.

Sending Messages Through Email or Text

Sometimes, scammers send enticing links to your device to get you to click on them. Often, these contain malware services that work to steal your private information and download malware onto your device.

Creating a Sense of Urgency 

Scammers often use fear tactics to make it seem like a time sensitivity or limited-time offer requires you to act immediately. They don’t want you to be able to evaluate what’s happening. Take a deep breath and think through the situation whenever you receive a message from someone you don’t know.

Saying You Won a Foreign Lottery 

U.S. citizens cannot play the lottery in a foreign country, so don’t trust anyone who asks you to break the law. 

As a rule of thumb, if you’re unsure about sweepstakes or lottery companies sending you a prize notification, search online to see if you can find any information on them. You can look up the organization's name alongside “complaint” or “scam” to see if anyone else has been affected by them.

How Can You Avoid Lottery Scams?

The best way to avoid a lottery scam is to understand how a real lottery or sweepstake works. If you play the Powerball or Mega Millions, there is no way for the federal government to be able to track you down if you win. So if anyone reaches out to you claiming that you’re a lottery winner or that you’ve just won a lottery jackpot, it’s not legitimate.

Additionally, real sweepstakes are free and will never ask you to pay any money to play or increase your chances of winning. Contest promoters also need to tell you certain things before you can enter, such as mentioning that entering is free, the odds of winning, and how you’d redeem a prize. So if an authentic sweepstakes promoter calls you, they’d be legally required to tell you these things.

And if you get sweepstakes in the mail, they must say that you do not have to participate or that participating is entirely voluntary. They cannot say you’re a winner unless you’ve won the drawing.

Note that even if you do enter a legitimate contest, promoters do have a right to be able to sell your information to advertisers. So if you sign up for one, you might need to be prepared for promotional mail, telemarketing calls, or spam emails and texts.

Skills Contest vs. Lottery

In a contest of skills, you can win prizes or money by participating in a game requiring skill rather than luck. This might include answering trivia, completing an obstacle course, or solving puzzles. Carnival games are a great example of a game of skill that can legally ask you to pay before playing.

Scammers pretending to be a game of skill can be more challenging than those pretending to be sweepstakes companies or lottery promoters. Generally, a skills contest will never pressure you into playing, and they won’t tell you that paying more increases your ability to win. If you receive messages from a skills contest, read up on the company before entering.

What Should You Do If You Gave Money to a Scammer?

If you accidentally give money to a scammer, the first thing to do is stay calm and don’t panic. This happens to the best of people, and scammers can be super sneaky. Plus, there are ways you might be able to recoup your losses.

First, did you give the scammer money through a credit or debit card ? If so, freeze the card immediately and contact your bank . Tell them the transaction was fraudulent and ask them to reverse it to give you your money back. You can contact the wire transfer company if you send money through a wire transfer.

For electronic transfers through an app like Venmo, getting your money back can be a bit more challenging since these services are usually not insured. With that said, you can contact the company and ask them to reverse the payment.

You’ll also want to report the scammer to decrease the likelihood of something similar affecting somebody else. You can notify them through the Federal Trade Commission by clicking this link and filling out the online form. You can also contact your state attorney general and the US Postal Inspection Service if your fraudulent documents come in the mail.

What Are Dos and Don’ts of a Lottery Scam?

If you suspect you’re being targeted by a scam or about to enter a sweepstake, you must know some things to do and not to do.

• Read everything that you receive carefully.
• Hang up on cold calls claiming to be from well-known contests.
• Carefully check your odds of winning, and don’t enter contests that do not disclose this information.
• Read the fine print on a legitimate contest form to ensure you understand the rules for playing, how to redeem a prize, and the chances of winning.
• Be wary. An FTC survey found that individuals willing to take risks were three times more likely to fall victim to sweepstakes scams .
• Pay fees to claim a prize, or pay money thinking it will improve your odds.
• Provide personal or financial information to anyone.
• Believe in social media messages claiming to be from celebrities or influencers.
• Call numbers with 876, 809, or 284 area codes — these are from Caribbean countries that have become hotbeds for scams and fraud.

In Conclusion

Lottery scams have become increasingly popular and are just as effective now with the rise of social media and text messages. No legitimate sweepstakes or lottery will ever contact you directly, and they certainly will not ask you to pay money upfront before being able to claim your prize.

If you’re a victim of a scammer, you can report them to the FTC and try to recoup your losses by reaching out to your bank or credit card company. You can also avoid scams in the first place by knowing their tactics and knowing what a legitimate contest looks like.

Keep your money safe, and have fun doing it with Yotta. We offer banking services that pay out interest in prizes of up to $1 million daily. 

Join today to see why over 500,000 users choose Yotta to spend, save, and manage their money.

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Banking services provided by Evolve Bank & Trust; Member FDIC. Lending services are offered via Synapse Credit LLC. Yotta does not own or collect on any debt at any phase of the lending cycle. Lending services are currently only available in Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Please see here for more details on the states that Yotta loans are available in. 1) Early access to direct deposit depends on the timing of the submission of the payment file from the payer. We generally make these funds available on the day the payment file is received, which may be up to 2 days earlier than the scheduled payment date. *Odds of a free purchase depend on if you have direct deposit setup as well as how many referrals you have. With direct deposit setup, your odds are 1 in 150 for the debit card on average and a 1 in 75 for the credit card on average. Every friend you refer unlocks you 30 days of 1 in 100 odds on average for free stuff on your debit card and 1 in 50 odds on average for your credit card.

Let ABC15 Know viewers warn, Becky Bell lottery winner scam is circulating again

PHOENIX — Within the last few months, Let ABC15 Know has received nearly 20 emails and calls from viewers who have all received a questionable message.

The message claims to be from a Powerball lottery winner, who seems to be very generous with her winnings.

In September 2023 the Let ABC15 Know team first told viewers about the lottery scam. These messages seem to be making the rounds again.

ABC15 viewers like Sabrina, Kimberlee, and Laura, said they all received a similar email or text message.

The suspicious message claims to be from a woman named Becky Bell, a Powerball lottery winner in 2023 out of Washington.

The message claimed the lottery winner decided to give away her winnings to random people selected.

Tami wrote ABC15 to share she received a suspicious message that instructed her to text a “special code” to a given number.

Betty, another viewer, said her message said she needed to pay a $575 activation fee to receive a $250,000 check.

Both messages were a lie.

Todd Terrell, of the Arizona State Lottery, says to be suspicious of messages like this. “If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is too good to be true.”

Terrell said scammers will use some truth to make their scheme appear legitimate. Scammers often find real jackpot winners, as their names and details are listed publicly.

They’ll then create fake websites, social media pages, and other accounts using the winner’s name and likeness.

The messages are sent out to different platforms, like social media, phone text and/or email.

Scammers are usually trying to get a victim’s personal and or financial information.

“You just have to think through this process, and understand if it sounds plausible, or is [there] something wrong with this. Most likely there is something wrong with it,” said Terrell.

Terrell adds scammers will use state lottery logos and other ploys to trick victims, and lottery scams will increase when jackpot winnings reach balloon amounts, as they’re trying to prey on a victim’s hopes and dreams.

If you receive a suspicious email or text message, report it. If you have been a victim report it.

File a complaint with the Arizona Attorney General.

File a report with the Federal Trade Commission.

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Lottery Scam in a Third-World Nation: The Economics of a Financial Crime and its Breadth

2013, Asian Journal of Business Management

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Jamaica is known as a popular Caribbean destination, where millions of tourists visit its shores. However, Jamaica also has the reputation of being heavily indebted and violent. Now infamous for "Lottery Scamming" a type of advanced fee fraud, where scammers swindle victims out of millions of dollars and use the money to fund lavish lifestyles. The objectives of this study are to highlight alternative views of lottery scamming, as a result of years of socioeconomic depression and turmoil and not just a crime. The study presents a background investigation into lottery scamming, the motivations and causes. The study also highlights scenarios used by scammers to swindle their victims. The analysis uses a combination of criminological theories and economic perspectives. Preliminary results show that many people enter into lottery scamming by an intercommunity snowballing effect. Other results indicate that lottery scamming's existence and promulgation is indicative of the geography and employment patterns of Montego Bay. Other views suggest that participation in lottery scamming is as a result of circumstance and people engage in lottery scamming initially based on the need to survive. Other related criminal activities such as murder and gang violence have economic underpinnings, and therefore strategies to fight crime must view the issue holistically.

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This article is an exploration of the recent phenomenon of " lottery scam-ming " in Jamaica. By using black market data to identify targets and presenting as call center employees, scammers subversively manipulate the development apparatuses of information communication technologies and business process outsourcing. The victimization the scam produces creates new circuits of interaction with North Americans that invert long-defined relations of capital between the United States and Jamaica and reconfigures transnational connections of commerce and labor. The article demonstrates how scammers, through criminal manipulations of development , are able to reconcile longer histories and broader circuits of inequality through contemporary gain, producing a novel sense of postcolonial repair. [

Jamaica Observer Newspaper

Professor Donna P Hope

The first time I ever came in contact with any form of scamming was during one of my infrequent trips to New York in the early 1990s. Some of my friends had migrated, (or run off) to the USA and were figuring out their immigration status while hustling away in Brooklyn or the Bronx. One such friend explained that a planned shopping trip was imminent because of "a new credit card" that had been acquired from "the credit card guy" for US$50.00 with a spending limit of US$500. I did not understand. Back then, ordinary Jamaicans did not have credit cards. We saw them in movies, and marvelled at how 'rich' these people were, who could run a card and buy anything they needed.

Dr. Afework H / G Abebe

This study explores the socio-cultural status of Wolaita children who were involved in Lottery sales. Specifically, the study was aimed to investigate the socio-cultural factors (push/pull) that make lottery sellers to engage in the lottery ticket sale, to explore the challenges and opportunities of lottery sellers in the new environment, to distinguish the contribution of lottery sales for the children's families cultural and social life improvements and To find out the cultural and social effects of lottery sales for lottery vendors. It is child labor exploitation for they are not beneficial after moving long-distance and selling lottery tickets. Besides, the children are challenged in the new environment by robbery, physical and mental damage, and lack of education. The socio-cultural effect was that it increases socialization, exposure to physical and mental damage, robbery, and drop out of school, misperception of society about lottery sales that considering it illegal affects children's Psychology. Thus, the result indicates that children were not socially and frugally beneficial by lottery sales

Department of Trade and Industry - booklet

Stephen Louw

Feasibility study on the legalisation of unlicensed lotteries in SA, primarily fahfee, conducted for the National Lotteries Commission (NLC). The study also investigates the viability of centralised/NLC regulation of sports pools and bets placed on the outcome of a lottery. The authors are supportive of legalising fahfee, although sceptical of the viability of so-doing. The authors raise various concerns about changing the regulatory responsibility for sports pools and lottery betting.

Journal of Gambling Issues

Garry Smith

This commentary examines the major lottery scandals in Ontario and British Columbia that broke in 2006, with particular emphasis on the precipitating conditions, sustaining factors, consequences, lessons learned, and resolutions. The aim of this article is to identify fundamental causes and common threads so that future lottery scandals might be averted. The scandals discussed here resulted from a combustible mix of easy-to-circumvent rules, profit-seeking agendas, and light-touch self-regulation. Although tighter controls were imposed on the two provincial lottery corporations after the scandals, neither organization appears to have markedly altered its pre-scandal culture or business plan. Various gambling regulatory styles are noted in the paper and because the current governmental practice of self-regulation is thought to have contributed to the two Canadian lottery scandals, a system of independent gambling oversight is recommended.

Brad Humphreys

Government sponsored lotteries operate around the world. Their popularity has grown substantially over time. Legal lottery gambling generates significant public revenue, much of it from the lower part of the income distribution. Lottery is almost always an unfair bet, so explaining the purchase of lottery tickets by risk-averse consumers has long challenged economic theory. Lotteries can be analyzed from the perspective of public finance, as source of public revenue, or consumer theory, as a consumer commodity.

Saleem Marsoof

This is a proof copy of an article published in the Journal of Financial Crime (2003) Vol. 10 No. 4 dealing with the question of how to make crime unprofitable by blocking the process of converting the profits of crime (black money) to what would look like legitimate funds (good money). The article was written four years prior to the enactment by the Parliament of Sri Lanka of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act No. 5 of 2006, but the article makes provision to the bill that was at that time before the Legal Draftsman.

Veritas et Justitia

Hansel Ardison

Mass scale investment fraud (Ponzi) schemes result in protracted suffering for the victims. In this article the author investigates this crime from a juridical normative, case, and conceptual approach. From the very start potential victims may fall to promises of lucrative and safe investment schemes. In the eyes of the more prudent, it would or should be obvious that the collaborative business offers as presented contains logical flaws, running against common sense and is at the outset illegal. Notwithstanding, victims seems to fall easily into this trap, lured by the promise of getting easy, quick, and huge investment returns. In the end, even when this fraudulent investment scheme unravels, the government of law enforcement seems to be unable to act decisively and offer a satisfactory solution. Slow and ineffective government response in the end exacerbate economic loss and victims suffering.

Ilana van Wyk

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Lottery scamming Interesting Essay Topic Ideas

Internet fraud, likelihood of winning lotto jackpot, 11 facts about elder abuse, cyber crime in banking sector, white collar crimes, a history of gambling, an introduction to legalized gambling in the united states, gambling should be legalized in florida, the history of gambling and the recent efforts made to ban it, text gambling in the philippines, how to fight against internet fraud and cyber crime, a history of gambling in united states that was brought by the british and dutch, the federal trade commission, legalizing gambling, does a person need to be smart to become a millionaire, legalizing gambling, how to be a successful overseas filipino worker, dualism: mind, body, and cognitive science.

N.J. fraudster who ran a fake lottery, stole $4M from victims, gets prison sentence

• Published: Jun. 12, 2024, 4:45 p.m.
• Nicolas Fernandes | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

A man who ran a lottery scam and defrauded victims of more than $4 million has been sentenced to federal prison.

Pablo Estrada, 27, of Florence, was sentenced to 33 months in Camden federal court on Wednesday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office District of New Jersey said in a news release. He pleaded guilty to money laundering in the summer of 2023.

Estrada orchestrated multiple scams that targeted older adult victims from Aug. 2020 to Jan. 2023, authorities said.

One of the schemes was a fake lottery, in which victims received a notification that they won a large sum of money, but were required to pay a fee before receiving the funds, federal prosecutors said. Estrada transferred the payments he received from the fees to various bank accounts that he controlled, officials said.

Some of those accounts were associated with his two businesses, Vital Solutions LLC and Futura Consulting LLC, court documents said. He also falsely stated on bank documents that the two companies did not transmit money and that their main purpose was to provide consulting services, according to court papers.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office did not provide details on any of his other scams.

As part of his sentence, he will also serve three years of supervised release and has been ordered to pay $4,210,000 in restitution.

Stories by Nicolas Fernandes

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How To Spot, Avoid, and Report Fake Check Scams

Fake checks might look like business or personal checks, cashier’s checks, money orders, or a check delivered electronically. Here’s what to know about fake check scams.

Types of Fake Checks Scams

• Why Do These Scams Work?

Fake Checks and Your Bank

How to avoid a fake check scam, what to do if you sent money to a scammer, report fraud.

In a fake check scam, a person you don’t know asks you to deposit a check. It’s usually for more than they owe you, and it’s sometimes for several thousand dollars. They tell you to send some of the money back to them or to another person. They always have a good story to explain why you can’t keep all the money. They might say they need you to cover taxes or fees for a prize, to buy supplies for a job, to send back money they overpaid, or something else. But this is a scam. Here’s how to spot it.

Lots of scammers use fake checks to get your money. Here are some examples:

• Mystery shopping . Scammers pretend to hire you as  a mystery shopper . They tell you that your first assignment is to evaluate a retailer that sells gift cards, money orders, or a wire transfer service like Western Union or MoneyGram. You get a check with instructions to deposit it in a personal bank account and wire some of the money to someone else. But once you do, the money is gone and the so-called “employer” can disappear, too.

• Personal assistants . You apply online and think you’re getting hired as a personal assistant. You get a check and are told to use the money to buy gift cards and send the PIN numbers to your “boss.” But that’s a scammer, and once they get the gift card PINs, they use them instantly. That leaves you without the money when the bank figures out the check was fake.

• Car wrap decals . You respond to an offer for car wrap advertising. The company tells you to deposit a check and then send money to decal installers. But it’s a scam, the installers aren’t real, and now your money is gone.
• Claiming prizes .  A sweepstakes says you’ve won and gives you a check. They tell you to send them money to cover taxes, shipping and handling charges, or processing fees. But that’s not how legitimate sweepstakes work — and you’ll be out any money you send.
• Overpayments .   People  buying something from you online ,   “accidentally” send a check for too much, and ask you to refund the balance. But that’s a scam.

Why Do These Scams Work?

These scams work because fake checks generally look just like real checks, even to bank employees. They are often printed with the names and addresses of legitimate financial institutions. They may even  be  real checks written on bank accounts that belong to someone whose identity has been stolen . It can take weeks for a bank to figure out that the check is a fake.

By law, banks have to make deposited funds available quickly, usually within two days. When the funds are made available in your account, the bank may say the check has “cleared,” but that doesn’t mean it’s a good check. Fake checks can take weeks to be discovered and untangled. By that time, the scammer has any money you sent, and you’re stuck paying the money back to the bank.

Your best bet: Don’t rely on money from a check unless you know and trust the person you’re dealing with.

• Never use money from a check to send gift cards, money orders, cryptocurrency, or to wire money to anyone who asks you to.  Many scammers demand that you buy gift cards and send them the PIN numbers, buy cryptocurrency and transfer it to them, or send money through wire transfer services like Western Union or MoneyGram. Once you do, it’s like you’ve given them cash. It’s almost impossible to get it back.
• Toss offers that ask you to pay for a prize.  If it’s free, you shouldn’t have to pay to get it. Only scammers will ask you to pay to collect a “free” prize.
• Don’t accept a check for more than the selling price.  You can bet it’s a scam.

Here are ways to try to get your money back, depending on how you paid a scammer.

• Gift card. Gift cards are for gifts, not payments. Anyone who demands payment by gift card is always a scammer.  If you paid a scammer with a gift card, tell the company that issued the card right away. When you contact the company, tell them the gift card was used in a scam. Ask them if they can refund your money. If you act quickly enough, the company might be able to get your money back. Also, tell the store where you bought the gift card as soon as possible.

Here is a list of gift cards that scammers often use  — with information to help report a scam. If the card you used is not on this list, you might find the gift card company’s contact information on the card itself. Otherwise, do some research online.

• Wire transfer . If you wired money to a scammer , call the wire transfer company immediately to report the fraud and file a complaint. Reach the complaint department of MoneyGram at 1-800-MONEYGRAM (1-800-666-3947) or Western Union at 1-800-325-6000. Ask for the money transfer to be reversed. It’s unlikely to happen, but it’s important to ask.
• Money order . If you paid a scammer with a money order, contact the company that issued the money order right away to see if you can stop payment. Also, try to stop delivery of the money order: if you sent it by U.S. mail, contact the U.S. Postal Inspection Service at 877-876-2455. Otherwise, contact whatever delivery service you used as soon as possible. 
• Cryptocurrency. If you paid with cryptocurrency, contact the company you used to send the money and tell them it was a fraudulent transaction. Ask to have the transaction reversed, if possible.

If you think you’ve been targeted by a fake check scam, report it to

• the  Federal Trade Commission
• the  U.S. Postal Inspection Service
• your  state Attorney General