SHADY MAILINGS OFFER MUCH, DELIVER LITTLE

If Helen Rose of Cape Girardeau gets any mail that promises her a million dollars, she just throws it in the trash.

"I never get all excited and think I've really won," she said. "There's no free lunch."

Most people do get such mailings with lavish promises of easy money and extravagant prizes.

Rose said she has read such sweepstakes mailings closely and they are never what they seem. Most of them are misleading and all of them require you to do more than just pick up your money, she said.

"They say that you have to do this and do that and buy this and buy that," Rose said. "Everyone knows that you don't really win anything."

"It's just junk," said Donald Kirn of Cape Girardeau, who also pitches these mailings into the nearest wastebasket. "I get mail that says I've won money or I'm a final participant in some contest. They're just trying to get you to buy something."

Most people don't get excited by this kind of thing anymore and several people said these things end up in their trash.

But these mailings do irritate some. The state's attorney general, Jay Nixon, receives thousands of complaints each year and he thinks people should be leery.

"These are fast moving, fly-by-night organizations working out of a post office box somewhere," said Jay Nixon, state attorney general.

While Nixon doesn't want to paint broad, general strokes and color all sweepstakes as fraudulent, he said some are definitely shady and try to trick people.

"When you read the pieces, they are made very carefully," Nixon said. "Most of them are written by lawyers. In small words it'll say what you have to do but in huge letters it'll say you've won some sort of prize."

Nixon said the difficulty is in the wording. The letters can seem legitimate to some and some are technically legal.

"These are crafty people, they're practicing the balancing act of being persuasive and being legal," Nixon said, adding that not all maintain legality.

Nixon said he hopes to help put a stop to these kinds of misleading mailings. He said his office has filed litigation against some of the individuals behind the sweepstakes.

"What we have to prove is they're (the mailings) a legal misrepresentation," he said. "We want to make sure these people know if they come into Missouri and pull this, they will face criminal charges."

Ventura Associates Inc., a New York company that administers several national sweepstakes, declined to be interviewed by phone.