Virginia Beach woman indicted in cross-country “Jamaica lottery” scheme
Over the last two years, the payments from across the country began to add up.
One elderly resident in Maryland mailed about $3,000 to the Virginia Beach home. Another living in Louisiana sent close to $500 in cash. One resident in Indiana wired $5,726.
In the end, numerous people believing they had won big in the lottery — but were told they needed to pay taxes and fees before getting their winnings — sent at least $50,000 through the mail or by wire transfer.
And according to a federal grand jury, a 64-year-old Virginia Beach woman, Nena Kochuga, was a central part of the scheme.
She worked with an unspecified number of people to contact the victims by phone and have them send money to her home address or transfer via wire, according to a multiple-count indictment filed in Norfolk last week.
As part of an arrangement, she kept 25 percent of the money from each victim herself. She wired the remaining funds to her “conspirators” in Jamaica and other countries, the indictment says.
While the federal indictment connects Kochuga to at least 9 victims, additional police reports and court documents link her to more victims of fraud both in Hampton Roads and as far as Colorado.
The scheme appears to be yet another in a much broader conspiracy that’s well-known to law enforcement officials: Americans have been duped into sending scammers their money after hearing promises of winnings in foreign lotteries or drawings.
Jamaica has been a hotbed for the issue — the U.S. Embassy there said it receives numerous inquiries from citizens defrauded of thousands of dollars, often by way of a lottery scam.
“Scammers frequently target the elderly or those with disposable income,” the embassy wrote on its website.
In 2011, Kochuga was found guilty in Virginia Beach of obtaining money by false pretense, a felony, court records show. She was ordered to pay restitution to two men, totaling almost $13,000. In that case, a Virginia Beach detective said Kochuga told them she was the “American contact for a group of Jamaicans involved in a money scheme known as the Jamaica lottery,” according to court records filed in Colorado.
Kochuga had an address in Glenwood, near Stumpy Lake, records show.
By 2017, a detective in Colorado had linked Kochuga to a fraud involving an 83-year-old woman who had been tricked out of about $20,000. That woman was told over the phone she had been awarded a $9 million prize, and began covering the so-called fees and taxes using money she and her husband get each month in reverse mortgage payments, according to court documents.
Those court records, filed in Eagle County, Colorado, where the well-known ski resort Vail is located, show the woman was directed to send the money to an address in Virginia Beach.
For now, Kochuga remains in custody in Colorado, after a judge sentenced her last year to four years in prison. She pleaded guilty to felony theft after admitting she stole money as part of the “Jamaican lottery,” according to the Vail Daily newspaper. A federal judge in Norfolk has ordered her to appear in Hampton Roads for a March 22 hearing.
“This is truly one of the lowest and most disgusting crimes I’ve seen in a very long time,” Bruce Brown, who is Colorado’s 5th Judicial District Attorney, told Vail Daily after Kochuga was sentenced to prison. “Taking advantage of an elderly person with limited income is intolerable.”
The Colorado case is separate from the indictment filed in Norfolk’s federal court on Feb. 7.
In the local case, Kochuga defrauded at least 9 victims between May 2016 and March 2017, according to the indictment. The victims — who the indictment said were elderly, but whose full names were not included in court records — lived across the country.
One person in Maryland sent about $3,000 through the mail to Kochuga’s Virginia Beach home on Aug. 12, 2016, records show. The next month, a resident in Louisiana sent around $471 in cash to her. In October of that year, a person living in Indiana wired her about $5,726. Another victim sent her a little more than $10,000 over the course of a few months.
“Kochuga would thereafter take the cashier’s checks, money orders and personal checks, which typically would be made out in her name, to whichever bank it was drafted on and obtained cash,” the indictment states. “Kochuga then wired the money via Western Union and MoneyGram to Jamaica and other countries.”
MoneyGram is a service that allows people to transfer money by wire to someone else virtually anywhere in the world.
Court records do not clearly outline how Kochuga knew the people in Jamaica, nor do they name any of the people she worked with on the scheme.
As part of her sentence, Kochuga was ordered to repay the money to the 83-year-old woman, Vail Daily reported.
Similar schemes have played out in other states.
An investigation that began in North Dakota has led to multiple federal indictments throughout the United States related to Jamaican scammers who called Americans with fake prizes and lottery offers. In 2017, the Department of Justice announced it was extraditing eight Jamaicans to the U.S. who used a lottery scam to trick at least 90 people, mostly elderly, out of more than $5.7 million, according to the Federal Trade Commission and The Associated Press.
Announcing the extraditions, the justice department said that an “untold” number of Americans fall prey to these scammers.