WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. \u2014 Florida is now ranked highest in the country for residents losing money to lottery and sweepstakes scams in the past five years. <\/p>\n
A new Vegas Insider study looked at data from the Federal Trade Commission and tracked state complaints to compile the information. Floridians lost nearly $66.3 million in these scams since 2020.<\/p>\n
Florida is topping the U.S. in these types of scams<\/p>\n
These scams target victims through multiple channels including phone calls, text messages, social media platforms, fake charity solicitations, and physical mail. A common tactic involves calls from individuals falsely claiming to represent lottery organizations, telling victims they’ve won a prize.<\/p>\n
The national impact is even more staggering, with Americans losing approximately $660 million to lottery and sweepstakes scams in the past five years.<\/p>\n
Consumer experts say several factors make Florida a prime target for scams , like the state’s large older population. Florida also tends to have high lottery engagement.<\/p>\n
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. \u2014 Florida is now ranked highest in the country for residents losing money to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1917,28,30,29,7059,2159,11176,8618],"class_list":["post-12216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-consumer","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-lottery","tag-money","tag-scam","tag-sweepstakes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}