TUCSON, Ariz. (KVOA) – The Pima County Sheriff’s Department (PCSD) Fraud Unit has returned $90,000 to a fraud victim in California after a detailed investigation spanning several months.<\/p>\n
The investigation began on September 11, 2025, when a local credit union alerted the PCSD Fraud Unit about suspicious activity involving an 80-year-old Pima County resident. The woman had deposited a $90,000 check into her account on behalf of someone she had never met, raising concerns.<\/p>\n
Detectives spoke with the woman, who shared that she had received a phone call from an individual claiming to be her late father’s accountant. “He told me that one of my father’s friends wanted to ‘bless me with money,'” she said.<\/p>\n
A few days after the call, she received a $90,000 check from an unknown sender. The PCSD Fraud Unit traced the sender to a 92-year-old man in San Jose, Calif. After speaking with him and his daughter, detectives discovered he had fallen victim to a lottery scam.<\/p>\n
The man had been led to believe he had won an $8 million lottery and needed to send the check as a pre-payment for taxes on the supposed winnings.<\/p>\n
On January 26, 2026, PCSD Fraud Unit detectives returned the $90,000 to the victim, ensuring that every dollar was recovered and sent back to him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TUCSON, Ariz. (KVOA) – The Pima County Sheriff’s Department (PCSD) Fraud Unit has returned $90,000 to a fraud…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151286,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,972,100,136],"class_list":{"0":"post-151285","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news","11":"tag-local","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-top-stories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}