81-year-old loses $400K and his house in a Jamaican lottery scam

"I lost everything"

81-year-old Norman Breidenbaugh is hoping what happened to him won't happen to anyone else. "I don't have a pot to go in or a window to heave it out of. I lost everything," he said.

Breidenbaugh, a Navy veteran, has receipts from six years of wire transfers to Jamaica and Canada — $400,000 in total — sent after he was told he'd won $2.5 million in a foreign sweepstakes. To claim the winnings, he was told, he needed to send $2,000 in "fees." The fees never ended. "They're slick, they're very slick," he said.

His wife died in 2009, and last year he lost his home.

Why he kept sending

The question everyone asks is: why would anyone keep sending money? Breidenbaugh says he saw it as a way to pay for his ailing wife's medical expenses. "The amount of money they were talking about would give me more than enough money to take care of her for as long as she would have lived," he said.

A growing cross-border scheme

A growing lottery scam out of Jamaica is costing Americans millions. "We see these almost on a daily basis," said Frank Schissler of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, which says lottery fraud out of Jamaica and Canada is growing more prevalent by the day, targeting the elderly with promises of big bucks.

"We're estimating losses at over $42 million in the last three years," Schissler said. Federal Trade Commission figures show the scale of the explosion: just under 3,700 foreign lottery scams were reported in 2008; by 2012, the number had jumped to almost 30,000.

Investigators are cracking down: "We've had some success and made over 40 arrests of fraudsters in Jamaica operating these kinds of schemes," Schissler said.

Breidenbaugh is now telling his story to the elderly, and his advice is blunt: "Don't say another word, hang the phone up."

The Postal Inspection Service adds a rule of thumb: if you're really a lottery winner, the only taxes you'll need to pay will be to the IRS — never a "fee" wired overseas.

Archive summary, March 2013, based on CBS Baltimore's report.