I had never met the woman but we talked on the telephone and she offered me a share of her lottery winnings. Sweet. A portion of $1.5 million smackers to spend any way I wanted.

I think I’ll take a long vacation first. Some exotic island with a name that’s hard to pronounce. Someplace in the South Pacific, with palm trees and coconuts and fruity drinks.

Easy living. Who needs the daily grind of work when you have gobs of money to burn? I’m just waiting for the woman to receive her lottery winnings.

Her name is Pat, and she’s 66 years old. She got a telephone call from a stranger who announced that Pat had won big bucks in a lottery she’d never heard of.

“She said somebody else must have entered me,” Pat said. “She told me the check had already been cut and it had my name on it.”

The woman who called with this spectacular news said she was calling from Euro Assets Financial Services, a group out of Holland. The company also has offices at 55 University Drive in Toronto, the caller explained.

I was already making plans to spend my share. If you had looked closely at my eyes, you would have seen little dollar signs. But Pat was wary. You know how paranoid people get when they win the lottery.

Ah … a catch

“I was told that to get the money, I needed to send them a check for $1,249.50,” Pat said.

Ouch. Hefty chunk of change. But according to Pat, the friendly people at Euro Assets offered to defer some of that cost. She would only have to come up with $624.10.

“They said it’s for insurance on the check,” Pat said.

OK. So maybe it did sound fishy, but I wasn’t giving up on my island vacation just yet. I started looking into this lottery.

Turns out there really is a 55 University Drive in Toronto’s financial district. There are brokerage firms, insurance agencies and law offices all over the 260,000-square-foot block of buildings.

So what if no one had heard of Euro Assets Financial Services? So what if there were no listings for the group in the Yellow Pages and no Web sites on the Internet? They had provided Pat with a telephone number, hadn’t they?

Nobody answered the four or five times I called the number. They did have an answering machine. A woman’s voice told me that I’d reached Euro Assets Financial Services.

“Hello, I am a reporter for a newspaper in Lewiston, Maine,” I wanted to say. “I’m very eager to do a big, splashy story about your recent lottery winner. Also, some of that money is mine, so gimme.”

I left a bunch of messages, but no one called me back.

Abandonment issues

Police who investigate these types of schemes say it’s common for the scam artists to set up message machines at numbers they will use for a while and abandon.

The Canadian Council of Better Business Bureaus warns that it is illegal in both Canada and the United States to ask a lottery or sweepstakes winner for money upfront.

Further, the Federal Trade Commission points out that if you play a foreign lottery, through the mail or over the telephone, you’re violating federal law.

The odds of laying my hands on hundreds of thousands of dollars were looking slimmer. Pat, on the other hand, never had believed it for a second.

“I watch the TV news, and I read the papers,” she said. “They always say you don’t send money to someone who promises you’ll get money back.”

Pat is a sharp cookie. No wonder she so readily offered me a cut of the cash. She called the Attorney General’s Office to report the scheme and then she called me.

We both worry about the same thing. What if the nice lady from Holland calls a more gullible person and makes the same pitch? What if the woman who answers the phone is someone who routinely has to choose between food and medication? A million dollars might sound tempting enough to clean out her life savings in order to get that big, fat check.

In fact, a 73-year-old woman in Europe fell for this very scheme. She sent money to the scam artists several times on several occasions. Thousands of dollars thrown away, and she now has no money.

There must be a special place in hell for people who prey on the elderly.

Me, I’m not giving up on dreams of fast cash. I must have a wealthy relative out there somewhere ready to leave it all to me. Or maybe the next offer I get from a stranger will be legit.

Don’t worry, though. I’ll still be the same person once I’m filthy rich. You can reach me any time of the day or night. Just leave a message with my secretary. I’ll get back to you.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.