The prize that kept asking for money

The story below follows one federal prosecution, with identifying details removed. The Justice Department didn't name the victim and neither will we. Amounts and timings added to tell the story, like the forty thousand dollars by month four, are illustrative.

The call says she's won twenty-two million dollars and a car.

The man is from a sweepstakes company whose name she knows, the one with the balloons and the oversized check. There's a fee before they can release it. Taxes, mostly. That part sounds right, because prizes are taxed.

He tells her the FBI is recording the call. He tells her she mustn't tell anyone about the win until it's finalized.

She sends a few hundred dollars, then more. He asks her to withdraw cash and send it by FedEx. Then he calls to say the package was lost, or stolen, and they'll need it again. Then there's a customs charge. Then a bonding fee.

When the cash runs out he suggests borrowing against the house. Later he suggests selling it.

She tried to stop. He called from new numbers and new apps, thousands of times across three and a half years. When she stopped answering he sent tow trucks to her address. He sent pizza deliveries she hadn't ordered. He asked her landlord to check on her, which put her back on the phone.

She lost more than six hundred thousand dollars and her home. She was 73 when it started. The man was sentenced in May 2026, after Jamaica extradited him.

The prosecutor's description of the method is the most useful sentence in the whole case file. He kept going, at every turn she tried to end it, "playing on her isolation and her fear of losing the money she had already lost."

The pattern

This is the prize, sweepstakes and lottery scam, and its defining feature isn't the first payment. It's the second, and the ninth.

Every other scam on this site is built to take a sum and vanish. This one is built to stay. The Justice Department's own description of these operations says victims "often are revictimized until they have no money left." The Postal Inspection Service says it runs "weeks, months, or even years."

The mechanism is simple and cruel. Once you've paid the tax, quitting means admitting the earlier money is gone. Paying again keeps the prize alive. Every payment makes the next one easier to ask for, which is the opposite of how people expect a scam to work.

There's a second act too. Lists of people who've already paid get sold between operations. The FTC has a name for them, and it's the scammers' name: sucker lists.

That trade is real and prosecuted. In May 2026 a man in North Carolina was sentenced to just over ten years for building and selling them. He compiled at least 22,000 lists covering more than seven million elderly Americans, sold to lottery-fraud crews in Jamaica at around $500 for a hundred to three hundred names. He made over $5 million. His buyers took more than $9.5 million from the people on those lists.

So if a parent was hit once and is now getting more calls, that isn't bad luck. Their name was sold.

One thing to be careful about

The famous sweepstakes company is a real company, and it does give away real money. Almost everyone using its name on the phone doesn't work there.

The FTC did sue that company, in 2023, and it paid $18.5 million in refunds to around 281,000 people in April 2025. But that case was about misleading order pages and confusing emails, not about running a fake sweepstakes. It's a different thing from the criminals impersonating them, and worth keeping straight.

The bright line the FTC draws is the one worth holding onto: the real company will never ask you to pay a fee to collect a prize. Neither will any other legitimate sweepstakes.

Where it was visible

She never entered. The FTC's version of this test is blunt: did you enter the sweepstakes or play the lottery? "If not, you absolutely didn't win."

A prize required a payment. This is close to conclusive on its own.

The payment method was untraceable. Cash by courier, gift cards, wire transfers, money orders. Nobody legitimate needs your winnings paid in a form that can't be reversed.

Secrecy arrived early, dressed as a legal formality. The FBI is recording, don't tell anyone until it's finalized.

The story kept generating new fees. A lost package. Customs. Bonding. Legitimate money moves once.

And the one that's genuinely hard to see from inside: the sunk cost became the reason to continue. By month four she wasn't chasing twenty-two million any more. She was trying not to have lost the forty thousand she'd already sent. That isn't poor judgment. It's a documented feature of this scam, and it's what the operator was working.

What actually stops it

Real prizes are free. The FTC's rule, four words, and it ends every version of this call. No tax, no shipping, no customs, no processing fee, no bond.

A prize you didn't enter for isn't a prize.

Never deposit a check and send part of it back. The check clears, then fails days later, and the money you sent was yours.

Decide in advance that the first payment is the whole decision. Almost nobody is talked out of this at payment nine. Many people could be stopped at payment one, which is usually small enough not to feel like a decision at all.

If it's already happening to somebody you love, expect to be the enemy for a while. Research AARP commissioned found that chronic fraud victims often trust the person scamming them more than the family trying to intervene, and called that the major barrier to helping. Knowing that in advance makes it easier not to take it personally, and not to give up.

The five signs, in this case

The five signs all fit, with one twist worth naming.

It came to you. She didn't enter anything.

It moved you fast. Though here it was slow pressure over years rather than one frightening hour. Urgency in this scam is a drip, not a shock, which makes it harder to recognize as pressure at all.

It wants a transfer. Cash in a FedEx envelope is the clearest version of this sign anywhere on this site.

It wants it kept quiet. The FBI is recording, so tell nobody until it is finalized. That instruction is what kept her family out of it for three years.

It keeps you on the line, across years rather than hours. When she stopped answering, he sent tow trucks and pizza deliveries to put her back on the phone.

And step three, wait a day, is the one that does the work. A real prize is still there tomorrow. This one needed a decision tonight, every time, for three and a half years.

How common is it

Smaller than the other patterns by total dollars, and older than any of them by who it hits.

In 2025, people 60 and older reported 2,785 complaints and $136 million lost to lottery, sweepstakes and inheritance fraud. That's from the elder fraud section of the FBI's 2025 annual report, published April 2026.

The striking part is the share. People 60 and older filed about half of all complaints in that category and accounted for roughly seven of every ten dollars lost, while making up a fifth of complaints overall. No other category in that report skews so heavily toward older victims.

The FTC measures it differently and reaches the same place. Adjusting for population, older adults were nearly three times more likely than younger people to report losing money to a prize, sweepstakes or lottery scam in 2024. That's a comparison between age groups, not a rise over time, and it's often misquoted as one.

One caveat on all of these: the FBI counts internet-reported complaints, and this scam mostly arrives by phone and mail. The real figure is larger, and nobody knows by how much.

Tell one person

Send this to a parent and ask them one question: has anyone called lately about a prize?

Not "you'd never fall for this." A question, asked without an edge to it. The scam depends on the answer being kept private, so making it ordinary to mention is most of the defense.

The sentence worth remembering: if you have to pay to collect it, it isn't a prize.

The names of people who paid once get sold, so a first loss is often followed by more calls, and by a recovery scam offering to get the money back for a fee. The same secrecy instruction runs through the family emergency scam, and the same untraceable payment methods through the tech support one.

If this happened to you, or to someone you love

You're not the first and you did nothing stupid. These are staffed operations working from purchased lists, and this particular one is designed to keep going long after a reasonable person would have stopped believing.

If cash went by mail and it hasn't been delivered yet, call the Postal Inspection Service now, 1-877-876-2455. They can sometimes intercept a package that's still in transit. This is the one route in this whole scam where money genuinely comes back, and it closes in hours.
Call your bank, card issuer or the gift card company and say the word "fraud". Keep the gift cards and the receipts. A card that hasn't been drained yet can sometimes be stopped.
Report it to the FBI at ic3.gov. Keep the original letters and envelopes.
Report it to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov.
If anything came or went by mail, report it to the Postal Inspection Service at uspis.gov/report.
Call the National Elder Fraud Hotline, 833-372-8311, Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern.
Expect more calls, not fewer. The list gets resold. Anyone offering to recover the money for a fee is the next scam.

Verify first.

Sources last checked: 15 September 2026.