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Marie Boivin was sitting at a Starbucks a year and a half ago when she got a call from her accountant.

“He said to me, ‘You have to turn on CNN,'” she recalled. “‘It’s bad. It’s really bad.'”

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Then-U.S. attorney general Loretta Lynch was standing at a podium before dozens of TV cameras, making allegations about a number of individuals, including Boivin, who was then chair of the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce and director of Ottawa currency exchange business Accu-Rate Corp.

The allegations of that day — Sept. 22, 2016 — would tear through Boivin’s life like a “bulldozer”, she says.

With Lynch was John Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control with the U.S. Department of the Treasury. They had a long list of allegations, stemming from a multi-agency investigation led by the Justice Department.

Their target? Mail-based sweepstakes scams.

Such schemes send millions of letters to Americans annually telling them they’ve won some sort of prize — money or items, such as a house or a car. To claim the prize, recipients are told to send a cheque to cover “processing costs” or other fees. The trick is, few prizes are ever awarded.