Being no stranger to human folly, having seen men trade gold for gravel and trust a painted sign more than their mother—but even I must tip my hat to the gall of one Miss Barbara Trickle, aged eighty, of Las Vegas. The venerable fraudstress, who should’ve been enjoying her dotage sipping tea and scolding squirrels, spent her golden years fleecing the gullible with more letters than a lovesick poet.
According to the ever-serious Department of Justice, Miss Trickle led a merry little band from 2012 to 2018, peddling fraudulent prize notices to the masses. These weren’t just a few postcards promising riches if you kissed a frog—they mailed out millions of these things, each promising the moon and charging a tidy fee of twenty to fifty dollars to get it.
Folks thought they’d won a cash prize–but got a paper report on sweepstakes or a bauble barely worth the stamp that carried it.
Miss Trickle, it seems, was no idle hand in this racket. She ran the operation soup to nuts—lasering, printing, licking envelopes, and counting the loot while her victims, many of them elderly, dreamed of riches that never arrived. After the first hook, she and her co-conspirators would send more bait, like a fisherman who knows the trout’s already hungry.
Once the law caught wind of the con and the Postal Inspection Service kicked in some doors, the tally stood at over $15 million siphoned from the hopeful and the lonely. That’s quite a sum for a business that traded in fairy dust and fine print.
Said Inspector Eric Shen, “The defendant and her co-conspirators used the promise of sweepstakes winnings to defraud the most vulnerable members in our communities.”
That’s a polite way of saying they sold snake oil to Grandma and told her it was champagne.
So now, having pled guilty to conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, Miss Trickle must face the music—whether that’s a prison tune or a quiet retirement with a dented reputation and a confiscated printing press, only time will tell.
So, if someone tells you you’ve won a fortune and all you’ve got to do is send ‘em twenty bucks—keep your twenty, friend. You’ve already lost the prize.
The Old Blog in the Desert 