I"m going to assume this letter I got today is a scam. It is from Freeman Hicks and says I have qualified for an award of 2 roundtrip airline tickets. The 'qualified" sent up a red flag. So, I did some further investigating. The return address is a Hilton Hotel! Also, the telephone number given has a 480 area code, but central Phoenix uses 602.
What’s the scam here? The letter arrived with a stamp and the envelope was either addressed by hand or a very good ink pen machine was used to simulate hand writing. The letter is on letterhead and appears to be generated with a word processing program.
I tried Googling the name of the company and I didn’t come up with anything.
480 is Scottsdale & surrounding. It’s probably junk mail for a condo / timeshare. Yeah, that’s a scam, but not in the same league as, say a Nigerian bank draft.
IOW, probably legal and aboveboard, but not in your best interests.
Was it really hand-addressed, or was the address just printed in a font that looked like handwriting? I’ve seen the latter crop up in my junk mail from time to time; it gets your attention for a little longer than usual junk-mail envelopes do, until you figure out that all the e’s and all the t’s are “written” exactly the same way.
FWIW, there are companies whose specialty is hand addressing envelopes for direct marketing campaigns. Here’s one I’m familiar with. They hand stamps the letters, too, so they don’t look like junk mail. Site includes a cool video. I’m not involved with this company in any way, I just know that they exist.