Michelle Levise laughs a bit now when she remembers the young man who called her home and told her she was a mega winner for the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.
“He wanted to know what I was going to do with all that money,” said Levise, who lives in New Baltimore, which holds bragging rights for Michigan’s tallest flagpole.
She doesn’t recall exactly how much he claimed she won — noting that she doesn’t like to clutter her head with pointless information. It was going to be plenty every month.
She does recall that all she had to do was send them a cashier’s check for $4,800 and they would come to her home and bring her winnings.
“Seriously?” she told me by phone. She had never heard of having to send someone thousands of dollars to claim a prize.
And there were other red flags, nearly as big as that American flag flying in New Baltimore at the foot of Lake St. Clair’s Anchor Bay.
Things like, move fast. The sooner she could send that check, she was told, the sooner that they could release that check out of Richmond, Michigan, which is about a 10-minute drive away. Why would they be waiting in Richmond?
And the phone number on her caller ID was different from the phone number she was supposed to call once she got that cashier’s check in hand. That, too, didn’t make sense to her.
What is a ‘Golden Harvest’ prize?
The prize was supposedly a “Golden Harvest” sweepstakes that would pay her over her lifetime. But she was suspicious because she never heard of…
