They are told to pay taxes or fees to a middleman in the United States by either sending cash, checks or money orders by U.S. Postal Service express mail, FedEx or UPS or wiring the money through Western Union or MoneyGram. After taking a cut, the middleman sends the rest to the fraudsters in Jamaica.

A local connection to Powhatan County in one of these schemes was made in October 2016, when the son of a 90-year-old man in Pawnee Rock, Kansas alleged that his father was scammed out of $46,500, according to a release from Rob Cerullo, deputy commonwealth’s attorney. The elderly man received an unsolicited call and was told he had won more than $1 million in an international lottery drawing and would receive the prize if he paid the taxes and fees. The victim’s son said his father sent two checks to Shmidt at his Powhatan address but never received a prize.

When U.S. Postal inspector A.L. Dalton began to investigate Shmidt, she found three other fraud victims – a 74-year-old man and a 59-year-old woman in Arizona and a 68-year-old woman in Pennsylvania – with similar stories, according to the search warrant affidavit. Those three fraud victims had a “combined total of loss of $56,349.”