Unfortunately, I received a letter on Saturday, July 25th, 2009 to the nature of the complaints previously stated.
I received a check from Kingsway Financial Services Inc. for the amount of $3985.00. Additional information in the letter indicated we had a lump sum available to us for $55, 000.00 USD. A statement was included in the letter regarding taxes which said Per your state regulations, a tax amount of US2985.00 will be required before your lump sum winning can be sent to you.
Of course this was exciting, but seemed too good to be true. My husband looked up the banks in question on the internet and both Kingsway Financial Services Inc. and the bank issuing the check, BBVA Compass, appeared to be legitimate. However, the letter itself did not! The letter had typos and the CONFIDENTIAL stamp across the middle was classic Microsoft Office, not to mention they took the added effort to include emblems from reputable companies and placed them along the bottom. Companies such as: WalMart, Target, American Express, The Home Depot, MasterCard, etc. What is worse is one of the banks had a big article on their site about WalMart, which only went to make the process look more legitimate.
I decided to do a little more digging on the internet and found many, many postings in relation to this particular scam after I Googled Kingsway Financial and Sweepstakes. It all became clear at that point. This was a big scam!
I only hope the word gets out before other individuals might be hurt by this scam. From the looks of things this has been going on for quite a while.
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