Monday, June 22, 2009
Crime
Have Boris-and-Natasha Lottery Ticket Scammers Struck Again?
Posted
By Joe Eskenazi
on Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 12:01 AM
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Have they bilked another San Francisco woman?
Earlier on this page, we wrote about a very short man and taller woman who allegedly bilked an old woman out of $10,000 in a bogus lottery ticket scam. It seems last week was a good one for male-female teams to con too-trusting San Francisco ladies out of money for lottery tickets.
Police from the Ingleside station reported an incident in which a woman was approached by a female suspect who claimed to be lost and looking for a "center" -- and then a man conveniently showed up and offered to drive them there. The female suspect then whipped out a lottery ticket she claimed was a winner and plied "collateral items and money" out of the victim in return for a portion of the "winnings."
When the victim entered a store and attempted to redeem said ticket, of course it turned out to be worthless -- and Boris and Natasha were gone, gone, gone.
The SFPD told us that they're not yet ready to connect the two bilkings (the police categorize such a crime as " Theft by Game or Trick," by the way). And the two incidents didn't exactly happen in the same neighborhood -- the first took place at Church and Cesar Chavez, the second at Persia and Paris.
The line we always used to hear (and sometimes repeat) was that the lottery is a tax on people who can't do math. But it seems there are more ways to lose money playing the lottery than we'd been led to believe. Let's be careful out there.
Tags: lottery, scam, SFPD, Image
About The Author
Joe Eskenazi
Bio:
Joe Eskenazi was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.
"Your humble narrator" was a staff writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015.
He resides in the Excelsior with his wife, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.
