A SINGLE MOM has been cheated of thousands of pounds in a lottery scam staged by a bogus winner claiming to have won the £ 123million Euromillions jackpot.
The victim, 44, was told that she would receive a share of £ 500,000 of the jackpot if she sent the scammer a loan of £ 5,000 for her mother’s open heart surgery in Pakistan.
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– 2 – He claimed his mother was too sick to wait for the jackpot funds to arrive. The mum, from Birmingham, failed to realize the third biggest prize in UK lotto history hadn’t even been claimed yet when she handed over £ 4,000, Birmingham Live reported. Camelot, the lottery organizer, said the real winner turned up to claim last Tuesday’s prize just three days ago. She had already coughed up £ 4,000 by the time her brother, a prominent local businessman, agreed to intervene. He said, “My sister is gutted and ashamed. We come together to try to cheer him up. ” The victim, whose identity has not been disclosed, said: “I was not naive, I was stupid. These days I find it really hard not to help people. ” His brother confronted the scammer at a McDonald’s in Solihull with the last payment of £ 1,000. The “smooth” fraudster cried as he was handed the money in a transaction captured on CCTV. The brother added, “Half the time he was in tears…” I can’t believe what you did “he told us.” I don’t even know you guys, and you did that for me when my own friends won’t give me a ten ”. “Yes, I felt a rat, but, at that point, my sister was too deep.” The businessman managed to take a photo of the individuals driving license as proof of identity. Although the name could be wrong, the image is of the man who claimed to have won the £ 123million jackpot. The license image has been sent to Action Fraud, West Midlands Police have been notified, and NatWest Bank has details of the account the victim’s money was sent to. The scammer defrauded the woman after entering the company where she worked on June 13 with the fake note. He said his ticket had already been checked at nearby Sainsbury’s and staff told him to call Camelot immediately. He said he didn’t trust the supermarket workers and begged the vulnerable mother and a male colleague to use their phones. Then he claimed his English was too poor to understand the information and passed the phone to the mother who said the numbers and date on the departure ticket. They were informed over the phone by a “smart English” voice that the fake winner would have to leave immediately to collect the multi-million prize at Watford – 100 miles away. The two collected the salary for the £ 100 fare from overseas and £ 140 for his Wolverhampton Travelodge as he did not want to return home to Birmingham. It was then that he applied for the loan for the surgery, saying that the good deed would be rewarded with the half million “thank you”. The victim was convinced that she had become rich overnight until Tuesday afternoon moments before the scammer who was supposed to deliver the money when her cell phone “died”. A spokesperson for Camelot said, “We are aware that there are individuals and organizations who attempt to obtain payment or personal information from people under various pretexts. “The national lottery, national lottery winners and other lotteries are sometimes misused in these scams. “We urge people to remember that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
‘I WAS STUPID’
‘I smelled a rat’
