Today my friend and I had a good laugh over her mail from yesterday. She had letters from eight different organizations, each one guaranteeing her $1,000,000 or more if she would jump through their hoops, and of course, remit money to have the privilege of winning such a grand prize. I added up the total of her "winnings," and it came to just over $70,000,000. That's for just one day of USPS delivery of monetary good news.
Although it gave us some humor and fun moments of "Where shall we go on a cruise?" speculation, it really made me angry. I took down the names of the eight organizations from yesterday's mail, intending to track them down. How naive! Before I was even finished typing in the first organization, a website, http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/sweepstakes.php popped up. As I followed the links, I found forty-two pages, approximately 1,260 listings of mail scams, all in alphabetical order! Thank goodness there are good people keeping track!
If we could peek into the lives of hundreds of people, especially seniors who are often bored, we could probably find two or three such letters that people have taken seriously at some point in their lives, building their hopes up for sudden wealth while wasting untold time submitting the "next step" toward winning, and losing out.
Lesson learned is "There's no free lunch," and there certainly isn't any wealth to be found in the daily mail! I printed the list for my friend, and I'm sure she'll be checking her mail against that list from now on.
