Scam victim offers a warning

For years, Patti Hammel said, she dreamed of the prize patrol knocking on her door.

She’d spend the sweepstakes millions not on herself but on her family, church and charity, spreading her good luck to those whose luck had run out.

So when the phone rang on March 23, bringing the news that she was a winner, it seemed like her dream was coming true.

Four days later, the 56-year-old had to be stopped by police from taking a tearful plunge into traffic on South Circle Drive. Several days in a mental health facility followed.

Hers is a story of silvertongued foreigners with false promises, of a grandmother who believed them and lost $7,000, of hope turned to desperation to suicidal grief.

It’s a story of a scam.

“It was being conned,” Hammel said. “I couldn’t take the fact I lost all that money, and I wasn’t getting anything back.”

Hammel shared her story last week, hoping to prevent others from falling prey to a sweepstakes scam. According to authorities, plenty of people do.

“It’s one of the oldest and most common types of scams that we have in this country,” said Robyn Cafasso, an economic crime prosecutor with the 4th Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

“They become a victim of a crime, and the chances of it ever being solved are so small.”

Though the scams are initiated in many ways — from phone calls to letters to e-mails to a knock at the door — the gist is the same: You’ve won money in a sweepstakes, usually from another country, but you need to pay a fee to get the money transferred.

Hammel had received such phone calls before and hung up on them. She has entered many sweepstakes, and even once cashed an unsolicited contest check that came in the mail — and turned out to be fake. So her name is on plenty of lists.

This time, a Mr. Robertson calling from Jamaica — the caller ID confirmed that — said she’d won a $2.4 million sweepstakes, and a check could be sent immediately if only she would wire $3,500 in transfer fees.

She said she believed it because she’d recently received a letter saying she was a finalist in a sweepstakes. Because the man with the accent on the other line was so convincing. Because she wanted to believe it.

“He kept telling me he had the check in front of him, and he was going to dispatch it,” she said.

She said she wired the money from the savings she and her husband had tucked away over the years.

No check came, and the next call came after midnight. Mr. Robertson had the president of the company on the line, and they wanted to double her prize, if only she’d wire another $3,500 in transfer fees.

She did it.

“The president was on the line,” she said. “I believed everything.”

Somewhere in Jamaica, probably in a room littered with cell phones registered to fake names, there was much glee.

No check arrived, Hammel said, but the calls kept coming, saying they had a tracking number for her but just needed some more of her personal information and additional fees. The calls never stopped, always from a different phone number.

By the fourth day, Hammel had changed her mind. She no longer wanted the prize, just her money back. That’s fine, said one of the callers. Just give your bank account information, and they’ll transfer the money.

Hammel finally realized she’d been scammed, and wisely hung up the phone. But she couldn’t shake the horrible feeling of being victimized. She’d been keeping the sweepstakes secret from her family, in hopes of surprising her husband.

Killing herself seemed preferable to telling him their savings were gone.

“I was a victim. I was abused. I was violated,” she said.

When she called police to report it on March 27, the dispatcher asked what her emergency was. She replied, if she walked into traffic and killed herself, wouldn’t that be an emergency?

That quickly brought police to her house, and she spent the night in the secure area of Memorial Hospital, then a few more days at Cedar Springs Behavioral Health.

Hammel has accepted there is little chance of finding those responsible. The phone numbers she was given no longer work, though she kept getting voice mails for days while she was hospitalized.

Cafasso said tracking perpetrators of such scams, especially when they come from outside the United States, is difficult.

“They’re just sitting in their boiler room making phone calls with a script, and it’s hard to know who you’re dealing with,” Cafasso said.

Though the calls, letters and e-mails come unsolicited, the perpetrators know who the victims are.

Often, all you have to do is sign up for one sweepstakes or respond to one pop-up Internet ad, and your information is shared throughout the shadowy network of scam artists. They’re known as “sucker lists.”

Though there are many ways to spot a sweepstakes scam, one giveaway is when it purports to come from another country, said Katie Carrol, spokeswoman for the Better Business Bureau of Southern Colorado. It’s illegal for foreign sweepstakes to award prizes to American citizens.

Through therapy, Hammel has accepted that she is not to blame, that she was taken advantage of.

“They’re con artists,” she said. “They’re real good at what they do. It’s like mesmerizing you.”

She finds comfort in sharing her story, but she also knows the episode has done more than ruin her financially. It ruined her trust.

“It’ll take a long time to trust anyone again,” she said.

CONTACT THE WRITER: 476-1605 or scott.rappold@gazette.com