An 81-year-old dementia-stricken grandfather committed suicide on a Sunday morning in Tennessee after receiving numerous calls from an unknown caller to whom he later wired all his life's savings after being promised to win the lottery with millions of dollars in prize money, a CNN report said.
Albert Poland Jr., a quality control manager at Burlington hosiery factory in Harriman, Tennessee, used a snub-nosed .38 revolver to end his life while his wife of 62 years was attending mass at a nearby church. He was found dead in the basement of their house, according to CNN.
In his suicide note, Poland told his family not to spend too much on his funeral and said he hoped that when more than $2 million [his imagined lottery winning] arrived tomorrow, it would vindicate him, CNN said.
Poland was among the thousands of Americans, mostly seniors, who had been called, lured and enticed by Jamaican lottery scammers who are engaged in this cottage industry in Montego Bay which targets this particular age group of people.
Nearly 300,000 Americans yearly, most of them elderly, have been enticed to send an estimated $300 million annually to the Caribbean island nation, according to CNN.
"The Jamaican lottery scam is a cruel, persistent and sophisticated scam that has victimized seniors throughout the nation," said Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, during previous committee hearings.
"It is truly heartbreaking that this scam has robbed seniors of hundreds of millions of dollars," she added.
Peter Bunting, Jamaica's national security minister, has acknowledged the extent of the problem and considered the scams as a "clear and present danger'' to his country's national security.
From children to the nation's most tech-savvy 20-somethings, from a former deputy mayor of Montego Bay to the most vicious gang members, lottery scams have left few segments of the island nation untouched, said Bunting.
"It is extremely corrosive to the fabric of society," he said. "We have seen where it has corrupted police officers. It has corrupted legitimate business persons who end up playing some role in laundering money."
The modus has become endemic in the country with many seeing scamming as the only source of income.
"In small pockets of communities you will find many persons involved in this activity. You will also find children who grew up ... to believe that this is OK—it's OK to get involved in lottery scamming," said Kevin Watson, a corporal with Jamaica's Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency.
Deaths associated with scamming were pegged at 200 a year in Jamaica alone. In the US, it has cost people's lives and investments, according to CNN.
During the court trial of Sanjay Ashani Wiliams, one of the scammers who had been charged in the scheme, at least 72 Americans above 55 years of age were found listed on his notes as having lost their money to the scam.
The Wiliams case marked the first trial in the US against lotto scammers.
