Agnes Day can’t believe that alleged scammers have targeted her. Again.

“I’ve had them all,” Mrs Day said of the scams. “But this is the first time they’ve tried it through the mail.”

Mrs Day said she smelled a rat the moment she read the glossy brochure that arrived in her letterbox last Monday.

The brochure purported to be from a Malaysian-based travel group celebrating its 13th anniversary, and providing her with two free scratch-and-win cards.

The first card was a loser, but with the second card she scratched up second prize in the lottery and $US190,000. The terms and conditions on the back of the card mentioned an obligation for winners to pay “taxes” or “mandatory charges”.

Mrs Day said she wasn’t fooled for a minute.

Her intuition was backed up by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s ScamWatch website which warns: “Unexpected prize and lottery scams work by asking you to pay some sort of fee in order to claim your prize or winnings from a competition or lottery you never entered.”

There are stories online of victims who paid such fees, but never received their prize.

Mrs Day said she wasn’t having a bar of it. She reported the matter to Lake Macquarie police.

“I took the brochure and tickets into Morisset police station and the constable said ‘This is too good to be true. Go home and tear it up’,” Mrs Day said.