Restitution slow to come for Jamaican lottery scam victim who became face of the case

HARVEY, N.D. — With piles of documents scattered across her dining room table detailing her struggles after she was scammed out of her life savings by Jamaican criminals, 90-year-old Edna Schmeets looks at her lap, twists her fingers in anguish and begins to cry.

She struggles to talk through the tears, to tell what it’s been like since it began with a phone call from a smooth-talking stranger eight years ago telling her she’d won $19 million in a lottery.

“That was a long gall dang time ago,” she whispers. And later: “It just keeps dragging on and dragging on.”

The courtroom part of the case is over, after seven years. All 31 defendants, including 14 Jamaican nationals extradited from that country, have been prosecuted. A few remain in federal prison, but most have finished paying their debt to society.

Though not in the eyes of Schmeets and her four children. Schmeets wants her money back. All $400,000 of it.

Now that the headlines have faded, Schmeets is hoping the U.S. government doesn’t forget about her, or any of the other victims of the scam that authorities identified in 31 states. Her plight launched what became the first large-scale Jamaican lottery scam case prosecuted in the U.S., she and her family point out, and they went to great lengths to work with authorities and help put the suspects behind bars.

Schmeets, who lives in a modest home in the small North Dakota city of Harvey, became the face of the case. But what she’s received so far in restitution, compared to what was taken from her, amounts to pennies on the dollar, and she’s having a hard time getting any answers.

Federal attorneys, who recently won an award for their work cracking the case, say they’re just as dedicated now as they were before, and they’ll do everything in their power to get at least some of the victims’ money back. But they acknowledge it won’t be easy or quick, and experts in the field of criminal restitution agree.

To Schmeets, it’s overwhelming, unfair and frustrating.

“I’m so disappointed,” she says, almost to herself, staring at her dining room floor.

The scam was run out of a Jamaican mansion where mastermind Lavrick Willocks — who personally scammed Schmeets — lived with his mother, Dahlia Hunter. The operation bilked more than 100 mostly elderly Americans out of more than $6 million, according to authorities.

It worked this way: Scammers called victims about bogus lottery winnings, persuading them to send advance fees or so-called taxes to receive the purported winnings, then keeping the money without paying anything to the victims. Authorities dubbed the case “Operation Hard Copy,” a reference to lists of prospective victims’ contact information used by scammers.

Looking back, Schmeets wonders what she was thinking in 2011 when she began sending large checks, provided her credit card number, borrowed money from her sister and cashed out life insurance policies. She even allowed the scammers to try to launder $25,000 from another victim through her bank account.

“I think about it every day; I always keep beating myself up,” she says softly. “How could you be so dang stupid?”

But Schmeets, then 82, had lost her husband not long before and also wanted to help her children and grandchildren out financially. She was vulnerable to being preyed upon, said Jeff Schmeets, one of her three sons.

“I’d come in here sometimes and I’ll tell you what, she would be looking at them papers and crying,” he said.

Edna’s children with the help of a bank worker eventually learned what was happening and alerted authorities, who launched an investigation in 2012. Suspects were caught and prosecuted over the next seven years.

Sanjay Williams, accused of being a major player in finding potential victims for the scam, took his case to trial and lost. He got a 20-year-sentence and was ordered to pay more than $5.7 million in restitution. Melinda Bulgin, a Rhode Island woman who worked for an airline and was able to use cheap flights to transfer money from victims in the U.S. to Jamaica, also lost at trial. She got four years in prison and was ordered to pay $333,000 in restitution.

The bulk of the suspects accepted plea deals with the government under which they got much shorter prison sentences and were ordered to pay restitution. Willocks was the exception at sentencing because authorities said he was the ringleader — he got six years in prison and a restitution order for $1.5 million.

“What I was hoping from when they caught these people and brought them over here is that they were going to throw the book at them — they were going to give them long federal prison sentences if they did not pay these people their money back,” Edna’s daughter, Lisa Appelt, said. “But they got nothing.”

The federal government spared few resources in its quest for convictions. The investigation grew to involve the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Homeland Security Investigations, Customs and Border Protection, state and local U.S. authorities, and several Jamaican agencies and task forces.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr last month presented the Justice Department’s North Dakota District with his office’s prestigious Award for Fraud Prevention. The U.S. attorney’s office takes pride in the award but doesn’t consider it the end of the case, said Drew Wrigley, U.S. attorney for North Dakota.

“We’re making every effort to secure every dollar of restitution that we can possibly unearth and collect,” he said.

But there are numerous challenges, including that many of the defendants living in a foreign country “adds another layer of bureaucracy,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan O’Konek said.

Scammers also have already spent a lot of the victims’ money, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Nick Chase.

"The fraudsters in Jamaica are living lavish lifestyles. They're having parties where they burn money, where they're washing their nice cars with champagne," he said.

The government remains “highly motivated” to “get every dollar that we possibly can,” Wrigley said, but he added, “I don’t know what that figure is going to look like."