The letter had all the earmarks of a sweepstake scam except one: There doesn't seem to be a catch.

Last week a Paterson woman received a letter from the Bank of Montreal, along with a check for $4,700, as the first part of her "international sweeps take prize." Yes, "sweepstake" was written as two words, the first indication that something was not legit.

Other hints appeared throughout, starting with the fact that the letter came from Canada, where many sweepstake scams originate, even though the check was issued by a Maryland company through a Minnesota bank and the contact's area code is in British Columbia.

Also, the letter contains a variety of telltale red flags, such as odd punctuation, grammar, spacing and capitalization, and the request that the recipient "keep this information away from the public" -- a standard request in Online sweepstake scams that arrive by e-mail almost every day.

But this award letter came via the U.S. mail and the check appears to be real, issued by a real bank (albeit from a little town in Minnesota). Also, the check contained no restrictions or terms, such as those often found on "award" checks that, when cashed, enroll you in a buying club or authorize the sender to switch your long-distance carrier.

The instructions on this one, however, told the recipient to deposit the check in her bank account and to send $2,850 to the "revenue Agency" to pay taxes on the lottery prize "as soon as the check is cleared."

So what's the scam? If she doesn't send the $2,850 until after the $4,700 has "cleared," she would apparently be ahead $1,850 even if she never saw another penny of the promised $417,000 sweepstakes.

Two similar award checks the reader received last week -- she's obviously on the scammers' hot prospects list -- had a significant difference. They wanted the tax payment sent by Western Union or Moneygram, thereby allowing the scammers to collect their money while the original check was going through a multiday process that would end with it bouncing.

In an attempt to find the twist, I called the Bank of Montreal's Ottawa branch listed on the letterhead and the receptionist told me what I suspected, even before I had finished my question.
"It's a scam," she said.
That's also the word from the bank's corporate fraud division, which is constantly dealing with similar letters, spokesman Ralph Marranca said.

The checks are typically counterfeit or stolen, and drawn against a legitimate business, so they might go through the system, he said. It isn't until the business gets and checks its monthly statement -- and that could be 30 days later -- that it realizes what happens.

And that's when the consumer is held accountable for depositing a bogus check.
Remember: The fact that money has been deposited to your account is not an indication that the check has cleared, Marranca said.
"Banks try to find a balance between ironbound security and convenience for a customer, but you ultimately are responsible for this," he said.
These checks avoid detection early on because they are typically not for large amounts for a business, Marranca said. An alert teller might question the deposit, but you can't count on that in an era of increasingly impersonal banking and ATM deposits.
International lottery scams are increasing at an alarming rate, federal and state officials say. One organization, FraudWatchInternational.com, lists more than 380 allegedly fraudulent operations it has compiled from a variety of official sources, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service puts the annual loss to consumers at more than $120 million.
That's money from people who get suckered in by the appeal of a financial windfall.
In one typical 24-hour period last week, I received eight award notifications congratulating me on winning a total of $10.1 million.
That included 667,248.26 in euros ($855,045.30) from Spain, $1 million from Australia (with two separate notifications), $4.5 million from one Dutch-based lottery (with three notifications), $2.5 million from another and 1 million euros ($1.3 million) from a third.
I'm not greedy; any one of them would make be happy. But the only person making money would be the sender, assuming a recipient buys into the scam.
Unlike the one the Paterson woman received, which came through the U.S. mail, most lottery scams start as mine did, with e-mails informing recipients that they have won a big prize -- even though they never entered a contest -- but need to contact a claims agent to collect their winnings.
That usually leads to a request for identifying information, maybe a copy of a driver's license or passport, to "verify their true identity," FraudWatch says. "This is where the scam begins. The fraudsters now have enough information to duplicate the consumer's identity."
While verifying -- and stealing -- your identity, the scam operators are hiding theirs, doing business with bogus banks and counterfeit checks.