I've received a check stating I won third place of the 15 Million Dollars Grand prize draw, sponsored by Martha Stewart Living Magazine. The check is in the amount of $5,889.00 from National Bank of Campbellsville, Ky on the check is Garcias Restaurant Inc. how do you stop these people from doing this?

My wife recieved a letter from the "Publishers Clearing House Readers Digest Sweepstakes". I was suspicious of it from the begining because there were a lot of things just like the physhing scams I get in my junk email. The drawing was supposedly held on January 21st of this year, the letter was dated "March 6th 2009" instead of March 6, 2009 and was recieved on April 2nd. Also it stated, like the physhing scams say, "we advise you to keep your award from public notice until your claim has been processed and your winnings remitted to you to avoid double claiming or unwarrented abuse of the program. These are the same type of things I see every time I look at one of the email scams. I then went online to do some checking because also the "Company address" was in New York City, while the phone number was in Quebec Canada, and the letter was mailed from Quebec. The main thing that was a red light was them combining Publishers Clearing House and the Readers Digest sweepstakes, they just don't do that. They are two different sweepstakes, and I have entered them both at one time or another. After about a day of searching the internet I finally convinced my wife that the check was counterfit and we are turning it over to the USPS for them to investigate further.

I just wanted to get this out there so no one else will fall for this scam. I am glad that the letter got to me on a long weekend and i had three days to research it on line. I received a letter from a buisness called Blanks Financial, a division of blanks printing and imaging. It says that i have won 50 thousand dollars and it contained a very real looking check in the amout of 2850.00, to cover the 4.5% government recomended taxes on my winnings. The part that got me was that for a company based in dallas texas, why did the letter have a canadian stamp on the envelope. I would have called them up and probably fell for the scam if it were not for that. because when i looked up the company and the bank, they were both legitament buisneses. I hope that buy posting this i will have stopped some one else from falling for this scam. I will call up the printing place up tommorow and inform them that the customer that they are printing the checks for is using them as a front for their scam. It has allready affected me cause i had dreamed of all the things that the money would buy me and skipped paying some bills because i knew that this money is coming in. as i have read some place else that it is against the law for some one to ask you to pay to get moneys from a sweepstakes. hope this helps some one and maybe some one can stop these criminals.