You Are a Winner!

So I go to the mailbox to retrieve my daily allocation of bills and junk mail, and neatly stuffed between the odd-sized grocery store papers and Penny Saver there is a window envelope with a very official sounding return address: Records Div. Payment Information Dept. Above the address window, a line says, “Check Payment Reference.” I know this has to be important, because it has the word IMPORTANT all over it.

The “important” letter enclosed has the heading, “Report of Payment to be Rendered.” The letter appears as official as any I have ever seen before, so I read further. There are ID numbers, Filer numbers, and impressive forms buried in the letter, but the part that pops right out is where it says, “Awards Payment -- $2,500,000.00.”

Yep, someone wants to give me two- and-a-half-million dollars. Who would ever say no to that? Of course, there is always fine print – the part they hope everyone skips over, and usually printed on the back. I only have to send them twenty bucks and the two-and-a-half- mill will be mine! After, all you can’t expect someone giving away $2.5 million to be able to afford to process the form for nothing.

We get several letters like this every week. They don’t send them to me, though. They are all addressed to my dear wife. Years ago, she bought into the Publisher’s Clearing House scheme. Yes, she keeps sending her forms in and even buys something now and then. Unfortunately, Dick Clark and Ed McMahan are both long dead and we still haven’t had a knock on our door from anyone bearing a giant check.

What this did, though, was put her name at the top of a list of people prone to taking the something-for-nothing bait. They are the same adults that still believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. They’re the ones you can always find headed to one end or the other of a rainbow in search of the Leprechaun with the pot of gold.

Are these “notifications” real? Again, in the fine print, they all offer to make a list of winners available. I haven’t taken them up on that offer either, but no one I know has ever won anything on these schemes.

I find it hard to believe that somewhere in this country there is a One-percenter that feels so guilty about being rich that he or she wants to give large sums of money way to complete strangers. And he or she has built a whole organization to come up with random names of recipients. Naturally, we can’t expect him or her to foot the bill for the organization, so those on the (sucker) list will need to pay to find out if you are actually on the short list to get “your” check.

I am old enough to remember back in the ‘50s there was a television show called The Millionaire. If I remember the theme correctly, some guy named John Baresfoot Tipton sent Michael Ansara out to give complete strangers a check for a million dollars. The only hitch was that they had to spend it. Back then spending a million dollars was actually difficult. Today that might make a substantial down payment on a house in an upscale subdivision. Maybe this same guy is now sending letters to strangers since Michael Ansara is dead. Nope, it was just a TV script – darn.

“Everybody loves a winner,” goes the song. Everybody would love to be a winner, is more appropriate. No body wants to be a loser, and they believe they are endowed with that ethereal quality called luck. Casinos make billions from these people. Desperation fuels the belief in luck, and in far too many cases those least financially able to send $15 or $20 every time they get one of these letters are the ones supporting this scam.

One of the wisest people in the world, my grandfather, once told me, “You do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.” I have always remembered that sage advice.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to answer an email from a poor Nigerian widow with a dilemma. She wants to shelter her dead husband’s millions in my bank account. Maybe there is an Easter Bunny after all.