Nearly every year, complaints about sweepstakes
crop up among the top 10 complaints received by the Federal
Trade Commission.
Recently I received a call from a number which I did not
recognize. The woman on the line told me her name was Louise and
she asked me if I could help her. She told me that she had won a
sweepstakes but was now being asked to send money to the man who
called her with the good news.
At first, I thought this was a gag because of
my recent review of the movie "Nebraska," which was
about a man who believed he had won a million dollars in a
sweepstakes. But after a couple of minutes, I realized that woman
on the phone really did not know what to do. She told me that she
had found my name on the internet and she thought that I might be
able to tell her whether she had actually won the money that she
had been told was hers.
