LOVELAND, Colo. --
A Loveland police officer got a surprise when he listened to his voice mail recently.
A man with a very thick accent told Officer Charlie Wilson that Wilson should call a 76-year-old resident and tell him the Jamaican lottery was not a scam, according to the Loveland Reporter Herald.
"I will need you to know that you’re dealing with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and you don’t question the bureau," the man said in broken English in a message to Wilson.
Wilson told the newspaper the senior citizen had sent the scammers $1,280 in an attempt to get a $2.5 million prize in a foreign sweepstakes.
The Jamaican sweepstakes scam was No. 5 on the Denver-Boulder Better Business Bureau's top 10 scams of 2010.
Typically the scammer calls someone and tells the person to wire a certain amount of money in order to receive prize money, the BBB said.
Officials said never wire money to someone you don’t know and trust.
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