More junk mail means more scams, BBB says watch out

Ross Howard from the Better Business Bureau shows me a check that a consumer recently brought in. It's for about $1,900 and looks real to me. Then he rips it in half. The paper makes almost a screechy sound as it rips apart. Howard relates that to the sound some people make when he rips up checks in front of them. "A lot of people just don't want to believe these are fake, but I'm doing them a favor when I rip them up."

Howard says there's more and more junk mail and more of it contains more and more scams. Case in point: one man recently brought in two weeks worth of his mail for Howard to examine. There were 36 letters."And every bit of it is either a sweepstakes, a voucher, a fake check or some other kind of scam," Howard tells me.

He says the consumer supposedly won four lotteries and a sweepstakes worth $12 million dollars. "As a matter of fact, if he had won all the money these letters claim he did, it would have been about $200 million dollars. He could go to lunch with Bill Gates," Howard says.

He also says the scams are buried in the fine print. He says if the consumer had fallen for all the scams, the man would have sent about $8,000 in the mail to pay for things like "up front fees and taxes."

"And because he would have deposited some checks in his bank (which would have turned out to be fake) he would have had at least 3 opportunities to be brought up on 3 counts of forgery and put in jail," Howard says.

Getting rid of all the junk mail is definitely a problem. "in most cases, the return addresses are benign, basically non descript post office boxes," says Howard. "So, it's nothing that would tip off the postal service and this kind of thing is incredibly hard to stop. About the only thing you can do is stop giving our your home address, which is easier said than done."

Howard says the best way to protect yourself is just throw all this junk mail in the trash or shred it.