Many people have received a letter congratulating them on winning millions of dollars which will be released upon the payment of a small fee of several thousand dollars. Most people are able to distinguish the fantasy from the reality and can easily see that this is a con game.

Unfortunately there are large numbers of people who fall for these schemes, and many of them are seniors. It is often detected by family members who note unexplained withdrawals of significant sums. The common approach is to try to convince the person that the promise of a financial windfall is a fraud and to try to point out the flaw in his or her thinking. They will show the senior articles from The New York Times (“Americans sent more than $30 million to Jamaica last year to claim winnings in a nonexistent lottery”)1 and The Wall Street Journal (“In a 2005 survey, the Federal Trade Commission estimated that 30.2 million U.S. consumers were victims of marketing fraud, led by bogus weight-loss products. Fraudulent lottery schemes were second, reeling in more than three million victims a year, the agency estimated.”)2 But, no amount of logic or persuasion can change the belief that the senior has won the prize. It is this fixed, immutable, unshakeable idea, in the face of contrary evidence, that defines the “sweepstake delusion.”

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