AN elderly woman has issued an urgent warning after almost falling victim to a $8.5 million scam.

Diane Wray Williams, 86, was initially excited to receive a phone call offering her the eye-watering sum.

But the former council member from Moorhead, Minnesota, also sensed something was off.

She received the call a few weeks ago saying she had won $8.5 million from Publishers Clearing House.

“I’ve been a person who falls for things, and I know that about myself because I’m not going to tell you lies,” she told Valley News Live.

“I was a guinea pig waiting to be picked up.

“I know a lot of people, a lot of organizations, a lot of causes that would love to have a little extra and I was ready to give it all away.”

However, she was hesitant about the call and sought advice from her family and neighbors.

“Even a person like me who is so careful, in my mind, my mother-in-law needs all the money she can get, right? So, I wanted to make sure I could double-check and triple-check, although 99% of the time I know it’s going to be fraud,” said Wray Williams’s son-in-law, Sajid Ghauri.

Eventually, a check showed up at the woman’s home.

Her son-in-law verified the addresses, phone numbers, and bank numbers, but knew that the high-dollar value on the check was fake.

“The honest people who work all their life to make that money and there’s dishonest people who come and rip them off,” said Ghauri.

“You don’t want to fall for the wrong person,” warned Wray Williams.

The family took steps to protect Wray Williams’s identity and filed a report with Moorhead police regarding the scam.

ANOTHER SCAM

Considering that Americans lost over $10 billion to fraud last year according to Federal Trade Commission data, it’s not surprising that Wray Williams’s case is not unique.

Scammers target victims via social media, phone calls, emails, fake websites, phony employment ads, and more.

In a post to the subreddit r/Scams, a student shared how they lost $3,000 because of an online marketplace listing.

They made a listing for $100, and a prospective buyer eventually reached out offering the money along with a claim that he had paid for a courier service to pick up the item.

He provided the link to a confirmation email, which the student clicked.

“The email turned out to be a phishing scam which required me to log in to my bank account, after which 3k was transferred out before I cottoned on to what was happening,” they wrote.

The user immediately called their bank and filed a police report.

“It was an incredibly obvious scam that I wouldn’t have fallen for under normal circumstances but I was just stressed out and caught up with schoolwork that I made a painful judgment error that is now biting me in the a**,” wrote the user.