Mum has been paying "fees" for months to release a sweepstakes prize and thinks the cheque is coming. How do I get her to stop?

#1tomd52(Joined Jun 2025 · 19 posts)September 3, 2026, 7:12 pm

Found out on Sunday. I was at Mum's (she's 81, lives alone, sharp as anything about most things) and there was a letter on the side with a claim number and a "final notice" stamp, and when I asked she got cagey, and it all came out. Since about March she has been dealing with a "claims agent" called Marcus who rings her most weeks. She has "won" £180,000 in some international sweepstakes and the money is being held until the taxes and the release fee are paid. She has paid a customs fee, a tax deposit, an "insurance bond" and something called a compliance charge. Mostly by buying gift cards at the supermarket and reading him the numbers, once by bank transfer. I got her to add it up on the back of the envelope and it's just over £6,400.

The bit I can't get past is that she is NOT stupid and she still thinks the cheque is coming. Marcus rings her by name, asks after my kids, knows about her hip. She says he's "the only one who's been straight with her about it". When I said the word scam she went very quiet and then said I don't understand how these things work.

So: is any of that money coming back? Do I go to the police? And what do I actually SAY to her, because the direct approach has already gone badly and I don't want her hiding the next letter from me.

#2quilterjean(Joined Sep 2025 · 22 posts)September 3, 2026, 9:47 pm

Tom, from the mum side of this (I'm 74 and I nearly let a nice young man into my computer, it's in another thread), the thing you said that matters most is "the only one who's been straight with her". Marcus has been ringing weekly for six months. He's built something that feels like a friendship, and you turned up on Sunday and called her friend a criminal. Of course she went quiet.

What got through to me wasn't being told I'd been fooled. It was my daughter saying "these people are professionals and they do this all day, and you're hearing it for the first time". That took the shame out of it. Try that before you try anything else.

#3Dana WhitakerFraud examiner(Joined Feb 2025 · 89 posts)September 5, 2026, 10:26 am

tomd52 said:

is any of that money coming back? Do I go to the police?

Tom, the direct answers first, then the part about your mum, because they need different tools.

The money. Most of it is gone, and it's better you hear that now than plan around it. Gift card codes read out over the phone are typically drained within minutes, and the recovery rate on them is close to zero. The bank transfer is the one line worth pulling: ring her bank today, say the words "authorised push payment fraud", and ask them to contact the receiving bank. If the funds are still sitting in that account there is a chance, and the chance falls with every day. Some banks also run reimbursement schemes for this kind of transfer, and the rules on who qualifies are the bank's to explain, so ask directly rather than assuming either way.

Reporting. Yes, report it, even though it will not feel like it does anything on the day. In the UK that is Action Fraud; in the US it is ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and the postal inspection service if letters were involved. Two reasons it matters beyond the statistics: it creates a dated record your mum's bank will ask for, and it puts this operation's claim numbers and phone numbers into the pattern-matching that eventually shuts them down. Take photographs of every letter, including envelopes and postmarks, before anything gets thrown away.

Now the mechanics, because this is where your mum's "you don't understand how these things work" can be answered without arguing. No legitimate lottery, sweepstakes or prize draw asks a winner to pay anything to receive a prize. Not tax, not customs, not insurance, not a release fee. Real prizes are paid in full, and any tax due on a large win is settled with the tax authority afterwards, never sent to the organisation announcing it. Second, you cannot win a draw you never entered, and I would gently ask her when she bought the ticket. Third, the sequence she has been through (customs, tax deposit, bond, compliance charge) is the standard escalation: the first fee is set small, and every later one is framed as protecting the money already paid. Fraud helplines regularly see victims pay somewhere between 5 and 20 separate fees over months before anyone else finds out, and £6,400 across four fees since March is, unfortunately, an ordinary case rather than an extreme one.

The part that will not stop on its own: once a person has paid a prize fee, their details are sold on as a paying lead, and the calls continue for years, often from a new "agency" offering to recover the earlier loss for a further charge. So the practical target is not really Marcus. It is the next call. Things that work: her phone number changing or call-screening being set up, her bank being told so they can flag unusual withdrawals and gift card purchases, and a family rule, agreed calmly, that no money leaves for anything the same day it is asked for.

On saying it: Jean's framing is the right one. Professionals, scripts, rehearsed all day against people hearing it once. The site's write-up of this exact scam, including the fee escalation and why the friendly agent is part of the method, is lottery, sweepstakes and prize scams, and it may land better read privately than said aloud by her son.

One limit I will name. If you find yourself thinking about taking over her finances, or wondering about her capacity to make these decisions, that is a legal and medical question about your own family, and it belongs with a solicitor and her GP, not with a forum. What I can say is that being fooled by a six-month professional operation is not evidence of anything about her mind. It is evidence of how good they are.

#4Walt F(Joined Jan 2026 · 17 posts)September 6, 2026, 2:03 pm

Dana's line about the next call is the one to hold on to. My dad paid a "prize release" fee twice in 2019, small amounts, and we thought that was the end of it. The letters kept coming for four years. Different names, same claim number format. We changed his landline number in the end and that did more than anything we said to him.

#5tomd52(Joined Jun 2025 · 19 posts)September 14, 2026, 8:51 pm

Update, because I said I would.

Bank first, like Dana said. The transfer was three weeks old and the receiving account had already been emptied, so nothing back there, but they've put a marker on her account and she now gets a call from the branch if she tries to send anything over a set amount. Reported to Action Fraud with the photos. Got a reference number, which is more than I expected.

The conversation went better on the second go. I used Jean's line almost word for word and then just asked her when she'd bought the ticket, and she went to look for it, and there wasn't one. She got there herself, which I think was the only way it was going to work. She read the article on her tablet after I'd gone and rang me about the "compliance charge" bit because it was the exact phrase Marcus used.

Number's being changed next week. Marcus rang twice since, she let it go to the answerphone. Not a victory exactly but she's not hiding letters from me, which was the thing I was most scared of.