Man sentenced for lottery scam
Wednesday July 14th 2010Lottery scams are rife in the world of lottery and we always bring warnings of those in operation as soon as we hear about them. However, we rarely hear about anyone being prosecuted for carrying out these ruthless lottery scams. News has reached us today that a Canadian man sentenced for a lottery scam in the US, conned thousands of elderly people out of their life savings. The scam operated for approximately five years and ended in 2003, during this time some victims lost as much as $60,000.
Henry Anekwu from Vancouver was arrested in 2005 for a lottery scam which told victims that they had won a lottery but needed to pay their federal taxes on the win before they could claim. As a result, many of the 79 victims of this lottery scam lost their homes.
Anekwu ran his lottery scam operations from two Canadian companies, Platinum Award, Inc. and Capital Award, Inc. and he enlisted the help of telemarketers to contact his victims. After his extradition to the US in 2009, Anekwu was finally convicted with the lottery scam offences in April and has now been sentenced to nine years in prison. Along with his sentence for the lottery scam offences, Anekwu has also been ordered to pay his victims restitution totalling more than $510,000.
The general rule regarding lottery scams is that if it seems too good to be true then it probably is and remember, you have to hold lotto tickets to win a lottery, if you have not bought any then you can’t win.