All he had to do was wire $10,000 to the Canadian stranger on the telephone and claim his $1.2 million prize. The offer was a seductive lie.

"I left the whole realm of reality," said Williams, a retiree who lives in Southeast Raleigh. "They sort of painted this picture of the camera folk and all these people coming by, like Publishers Clearing House."

In the past few weeks, 25 people in North Carolina have fallen victim to lottery scams like the one that snared Williams, five of them losing at least $10,000, and one throwing away a quarter-million dollars on a fake promise of riches, state investigators say. One hundred more people called to say they smelled a rat.

The number of victims has remained constant for the last two years, investigators say, with five-figure stings numbering roughly two dozen a month. Scammer calls typically come from Canada, Jamaica or Costa Rica, usually from people working out of a temporary phone bank and feeding smooth talk to retirees such as Williams.

Anyone with an e-mail account has gotten a desperate letter from a Nigerian potentate with millions trapped in an overseas bank.

But consumer groups warn that the con artists are increasingly sophisticated, sending checks that look bona fide, assuming identities that sound believable over the phone. Nationally, the FBI estimates that lottery scammers defraud Americans out of $120 million a year.

"The mailings they send out are very slick," N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper said. "The check looks real. The people who call are reassuring, and they sound professional. People just simply believe that they've won."

The scams stay profitable because the scammers play off a very natural desire to cash in against long odds, Cooper said. Many victims have at least an inkling that the deal sounds too good to be true, but their hope overrides their logic.

"People want to be winners," he said. "Even if they're a little bit suspicious, they hope so much."

Senior citizens are common targets because they often have a nest egg, come from a more trusting generation and, in some cases, suffer from dementia.

Scammers sometimes buy lists of potential victims from other scammers, Cooper said, often making second attempts at people who have been fleeceable before. Sometimes, Cooper said, scammers will offer to retrieve money lost to other scammers -- for a fee.

Common scams, such as the one that caught Williams in August, involve cold-calling people and announcing foreign lottery winnings. People know that they have to pay taxes on winnings, and they can be persuaded to wire money in advance.

But victims also receive official-looking checks by mail with instructions to deposit them.

The idea is that the victim believes more money will be coming, and so sends money to the scammer.

That scheme tricked Theresa Adams, a stay-at-home mother in her 40s in Brunswick County outside Wilmington. She deposited her $1,600 "winnings" check -- which was worthless -- and immediately spent $800 to pay bills. When the bank informed her the check wasn't any good, her own money had to make up the difference. Bank employees told Adams that they saw fake lottery checks all the time. They just hadn't seen one like hers.

Williams sent his money via the online cash transfer system MoneyGram and, after receiving a chiding from a neighbor, contacted the attorney general's office too late.

The victim who recently lost $250,000 was an octogenarian from Moore County, said state Department of Justice spokeswoman Noelle Talley. His bank notified the attorney general's office that he had tried repeatedly to send money to cover customs duties, processing fees and insurance premiums.

Once his bank account was empty, the scammers targeted his brokerage accounts and he continued to play into their hands.

Each time he sent something, he learned that yet another fee was required or that he had won yet another contest and needed to make another round of payments, Talley said.

She said Cooper's office has gotten Western Union and MoneyGram to block any additional wire transfers to the scammers from his accounts.

Cooper's office works with investigators worldwide. In some cases, he said, they can get to Western Union in time to stop payment. But often, the victim's money is gone without a trace as the scammers bounce from place to place.

Education is the best prevention, he said. If anyone asks for up-front money before winnings can be distributed -- which is illegal in North Carolina -- it's a scam.

Cooper's office and other state agencies hold "scam jams" across the state, including a recent one in Wake County, teaching people about telemarketing scams and risky schemes.

Williams said that even the MoneyGram clerks questioned his motives.

"That should have been a real light bulb in my brain," he said. "They were sending red flags."

The lure of free money burned brighter.

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