A young woman whose dad scooped a lottery win worth a whopping $17.3 million (around £10million) has revealed the dark side to winning big.
The Canadian woman, who chose to remain anonymous when speaking to the Other People’s Lives podcast, recalled how a British fraudster contacted them claiming to be her uncle after the jackpot.
She explained: “We’ve actually been scammed and catfished by people pretending to be our family asking for money.” The attempted fraud didn’t actually work, but she admitted “it’s scary that people know all the details.”
After her dad collected his massive win, one of his first acts was to share the wealth through his extended family. “All of my aunts, uncles, cousins and whatever got 25 Grand each I think,” she explained.
She heard from a number of people that she used to know, too, but not in a particularly positive way. The woman added: “Random people were coming out of the woodwork, people I went to high school with just saying random rude s*** to me.”
But it’s the fact that complete strangers seemed to know all about her life that she found most disturbing. “We had people pretending to be our family on random numbers messaging us and emailing us and making up these ridiculous stories to say that they need money,” she said.
“The fact that they’re naming people by name – that's the part that actually really scares me.”
The scammer was quite convincing. She continued: “My aunt got a WhatsApp message from who she thought was a family member that we have overseas – in the UK.
“It was a different number but he was saying ‘Oh yeah it's your uncle… we're struggling really really hard and could you please ask your brother my dad for money I need to put my son through school.
“He needs to go to university and it's going to cost this much and everything and it's just that's what actually really freaks me out because they know too many intimate details to use against you.”
Overall, she said that the windfall has been a massive bonus, but there have definitely been a few negatives. Dating has become quite complicated. She admitted: “It’s very, very rare that I tell people …and with relationships it's very tricky.
She explained how revealing her secret fortune can make things complicated. “I just went through a bad experience with telling a guy that I was seeing and I definitely shouldn't have told him… I was just too excited and not sober and I just said it because I trusted him,” she added.
But once the bloke knew about her money, he became a bit too keen, a bit too quickly. The woman added: “After I told him I thought that he was going to be normal – he had a normal reaction and so I thought everything should be fine. But wasn't fine. It seemed like his driving force after that was to want to make things work.
“[The money] was brought up a lot and he had a lot of uncomfortable questions to ask after the fact, so that wasn't great.”