In Her Own Words

In early 2004, in an effort to keep my mother busy while I held her captive in my home, I had her write narratives from a disorganized mess of notes jotted down in haste during phone calls from scam artists. My intention was to pass this information on to the FBI in a more useful form than the notes on the little snippets of yellow paper everywhere. What follows is excerpted from a narrative inexplicably started in 2003 at the request of Claude, one of the scam artists. Lola said he was high up in the Canadian government and needed this information . She continued work on it at my house, and I gave a copy to the FBI.

Canadian Sweepstakes Group

This is an account of the beginning of a call from a Quebec Canada gentleman (Steve Mercer) of Dorval, Quebec, who I believe was a customs agent. He advised me that I had won a sweepstakes from some organization and his office, I believe it was Canadian Customs and they would be handling the paperwork and delivery when all the fees were taken care of and he would be back in touch, however, he did say winnings was a check for $125,000. A few days or weeks he called back and advised the winnings were two checks of $125,000 each and the fees had to be sent via Western Union to various people at several different locations. Below is the list of amounts, names, fee charges, etc. and dates. [All transmissions were to Dorval, Quebec, Canada and incurred $139 each in Western Union fees]

8/20/2003 $2,560 to Katherine Winslow,
8/21/2003 $2,990 to Steve Mercer,
8/22/2003 $2885 to Howard Sands,
8/28/2003 $2640 to James Gray
9/12/2003 $2430 to Gary White
9/15/2003 $2400 to Alfred Kennedy
10/9/2003 $2740 to George Grant
10/9/2003 $2760 to Arthur Wellington

Some of the customs agents out of Canada were quite difficult and rude to talk to. Here is a list if it would help you any. Robert Garcia was supposed to be Canadian. [I have several lists, but I'm not sure which one goes with this particular narrative.]

This doesn't sound like vast sums of money, but it's a drop in the bucket of Lola's total losses. I stopped counting at around $260,000 lost to fraud in the 18 months prior to the guardianship. It hurt too much to keep looking at those bank statements and checks. My lawyer said her case was the worst that he had heard of.

It is not a coincidence that one of the recipients of her wire transfers was "named" James Gray. That was my father's name. The name Gray turns up frequently in the lists of people who called her.

The mail takes over

It covered every surface in the house, filled voids under, on, and behind furniture, threatened to collapse the floors. Boxes of it sat in the family room waiting to be sifted through. So much mail was arriving daily that Mother had her friend Bill install a slot in the side garage door and place a large cardboard box behind it. Each day the mailman eschewed the tiny mailbox and shoved reams and reams of paper through the slot: catalogs full of junk, sweepstakes entries and prize notifications; letters from psychics in Gibralter, France, Spain, and Canada; propaganda from Tom Delay, solicitations from senior citizen "lobbying" groups and bogus charities; brochures for anti-aging products, magazines galore, and so on. Packages, of course, continued to be left on the front porch. Legitimate mail, such as bills, got lost in the flood.

Publishers’ Clearing House and United States Purchasing Exchange

For years, my mother received a steadily escalating stream of packages. In the early nineties, when she was still living in Hot Springs, I started seeing a lot of boxes from United States Purchasing Exchange. Mother’s only explanation was that it was a noble entity with the lofty purpose of opening up trade with China. Years later, stumbling upon an invoice, I noticed that USPE had a sweepstakes. Of course!

That Publisher's Clearing House has long targeted the elderly is widely known. Mother ordered much more than magazines from PCH; she ordered all manner of junky stuff, with several boxes often arriving in a single day. She quickly stashed them under a bed, in a closet or in the garage before we could notice them (or so she thought). The Prize Patrol's arrival was always two weeks or thirty days or sixty days away.

Even as early as 1991, Mother's credit card bills revealed that she was spending around $400 per month on orders from USPE, Michigan bulb, and PCH. Multiple orders to Michigan Bulb in a single day were not unusual. Later on, the list grew to include sweepstakes run by such venerable brands as Reader's Digest and American Express.

Can you guess what our Christmas presents were like? Cheap jewelry, flimsy kitchen paraphernalia....

Once I gained control of my mother’s mail in 2004, my sister and I returned 16 packages to PCH in the first two weeks alone. When I cleared out the house to sell it in 2005, every nook and every cranny of every room, closet, piece of furniture, and the garage that didn’t contain boxes of junk mail were filled with thousands of dollars worth of these trinkets, many of them still in unopened packages.

United States Purchasing Exchange and Michigan Bulb went out of business, but Publisher's Clearing House is still going strong.