LEWISTON — When she saw the envelope, Angela Jonathan of Lewiston immediately suspected that someone was up to no good.

Still, her heart beat a little faster when she read the letter inside that informed her she had won $250,000 in a Canadian lottery. All she had to do was cash the enclosed check for nearly $5,000 and send $2,985 to the lottery company for “Government Taxes.”

In her heart, she wanted the news to be true, but her head knew better.

“If I hadn’t watched so many news shows and read so many articles about scamming, I might not have known to be cautious,” she said.

The letter and enclosed check looked official. Even the spelling was correct, and Jonathan, secretary to the principal at Colonial Village Elementary School in the Town of Niagara, knew that bad spelling and grammar were a giveaway on these types of scams.

Instead, it all looked legit. The letter used important multi-national sounding names like “Mutual Financial Securities,” of Ontario, and “First Clover Leaf Bank” of Edwardsville, Ill. The only thing was, there was no return address.

The crooks were smart, but Jonathan was smarter. She knew that a credible company would not send a letter without a return address.

And when she tried to call the company phone number, the voice mailbox was full.

“I wanted to throw the letter away, but I was concerned someone innocent could fall for it,” she said, and handed the letter over to the Niagara Gazette to investigate.

Several area law enforcement and banking executives contacted regarding the letter said that Jonathan’s common sense may have saved her thousands of dollars. In a typical scam, the customer deposits a check from the scammer, the check clears, the customer sends the scammers a specified amount of money, and then often begins to spend what is left. Typically the customer is later contacted by the bank and told the check was counterfeit. The customer is then responsible for returning all money to the bank.

“I’ve seen this a dozen times or more in the past few years,” said Town of Niagara Police Chief James Suitor. One woman received a phone call saying that she had been hired for a work-at-home job, he said. The fake company sent her two checks for more than $3,500 but asked her to return some of those funds.

That’s standard red flag of warning, said Carolyn DuBois, chief operating officer of the Greater Niagara Credit Union. “Nobody is going to pay you up front to get money back if it’s a legitimate company.”

The scammers are clever, she added. They typically keep the check amounts under $3,000, to keep the checks below limits that might alert the attention of the authorities. Most recently, the checks have been coming from Canada, she said, although these types of scams come from all over the world.

Ray Williams, a postal inspector in the Niagara region, said the U.S. Postal Service teamed with international agencies last year and made 76 arrests in Nigeria, England, the Netherlands and Canada, and intercepted $2.1 billion in counterfeit checks.

Williams said that postal inspectors are the lead law enforcement agency that tracks down the scammers in this country, but that international locations make arrests a challenge.

All law enforcement and bank officials agreed that ultimately, it is the consumer who must beware. The first step when contacted by a suspected scammer through the mail or on the Internet, is to contact local police authorities.

“We are continuously involved in consumer education,” said Williams, who said his division is happy to send speakers out into the communities to warn consumers about a wide variety of fraudulent check scams being perpetrated.

Officials believe the downturn in the economy will encourage scammers to try even harder too fool people who may be in increasingly desperate financial straits.

“They are lowlifes,” said Jonathan of the scammers. “Somebody ought to be ashamed.”