The Herald, Sharon, Pa.

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April 18, 2007

South Pymatuning couple avoid lottery scam by checking the facts

By Courtney Anderson

A South Pymatuning Township man knew the check he received in the mail from what appeared to be a Canadian sweepstakes company was too good to be true.

After doing some digging, it turned out he was right.

A letter arrived Monday for Douglas Coryea claiming to be from DataTrium International, saying that he had won $300,000 in the 2006 International Clearing House Prize Pool — a contest Coryea never entered.

The envelope also contained what looked like a check from U.S. Bank for $2,947.17 to pay for “administrative fees, delivery expenses and any other fees” related to the contest.

“When I got it out of the mailbox and started reading it, I said ‘You have to look at this. I don’t think I’m seeing right,’ ” Coryea’s wife Irene said.

The letter has all the markings of a classic Internet and mail scam.

Unsuspecting folks are sent a check to cover the expenses associated with a promised cash windfall. After they deposit the check in their accounts, they are told to send the money, usually overseas, to secure the found money.

Later, when the banking dust clears, they find they’re on the hook for a bad check.

“I know there’s a lot of fraud going on, so I approached it with a great deal of caution, being pretty sure in the beginning that it was,” Coryea said.

Aside from the absence of a watermark on the back, the check looked real and a local bank almost cashed it Tuesday morning before a suspicious Coryea had them verify that the routing and account numbers did not exist.

He said he described the check to U.S. Bank and a spokesperson said it was an accurate description of their logo and business checks but they hadn’t issued it.

“They did a good job on this,” Coryea said of whoever made the scam check.

The check also had Coryea’s name spelled wrong and, when he and his wife spent two hours on the Internet, they found the addresses did not jibe either.

The Toronto address for DataTrium is actually the location of a furniture store, and the zip codes listed for both the bank and D.T. Insurance Inc. on the check do not match the towns they name.

The letter claims the check is from D.T. Insurance and asks that the winner call “agent Richard Hicks” to validate it. When calling the Toronto phone number, Coryea said he got a “foreign-sounding person” on an answering machine saying they were unavailable and to leave a number and they’d call back.

“How many elderly people would say, ‘We could use this,’ ” Mrs. Coryea wondered.

“We could, too,” said her husband. “Who couldn’t? But we don’t want to end up in jail.”

Coryea said he was going to take the letter and check to South Pymatuning Township police.

A state trooper at the Mercer barracks said they field complaints about such scams but they’re hard to follow because they usually originate in other countries. He said the state Attorney General investigates fraud cases, too.

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