Nine Years Later, the Last Defendant in a $28 Million Sweepstakes Scheme Is Banned for Life

One of the operators of a sweepstakes scam that cost consumers millions of dollars has agreed to a settlement permanently banning him from operating sweepstakes or making any claims to consumers about prizes they have won or may win.DOCUMENTED

The FTC first filed its complaint against Victor Ramirez in 2015, alleging he helped operate a sprawling sweepstakes operation that took more than $28 million from consumers throughout the United States and in countries including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.DOCUMENTED

The letters that promised millions

According to the FTC's complaint, Ramirez, along with three other individual defendants and eleven corporate defendants, mailed personalized letters falsely telling consumers they had won large cash prizes, typically described as exceeding $2 million.DOCUMENTED To collect the supposedly "guaranteed" winnings, consumers were instructed to mail the defendants a $20 to $30 fee by cash, check, or money order — typically within 10 days — with the letters warning that consumers would forfeit their prize entirely if they failed to pay on time.DOCUMENTED

In reality, according to the FTC, consumers had not won anything: the defendants had no connection to any legitimate sweepstakes and could not have awarded or paid the promised prizes to anyone who sent in the requested fee.DOCUMENTED

The last defendant standing

Ramirez was the final individual defendant remaining in the case by the time his settlement was announced in August 2024, following a June 2024 settlement with three other individual operators — Matthew Pisoni, Marcus Pradel, and John Leon — who agreed to similarly permanent bans from operating sweepstakes or making prize-related claims to consumers.DOCUMENTED

"We are pleased that this settlement will keep the last individual defendant in this sweepstakes scam from harming consumers with bogus prize claims," said the FTC's Director of Consumer Protection — nearly a decade after the case was first filed.

A pointed statement about consumer redress

"We are pleased that this settlement will keep the last individual defendant in this sweepstakes scam from harming consumers with bogus prize claims," said Samuel Levine, then-Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, announcing the settlement. "Since the Supreme Court's decision in AMG, we are no longer able to return money to consumers who've been harmed. It is urgent that Congress restore the Commission's ability to make consumers whole when they are targeted by scammers."DOCUMENTED

That statement references AMG Capital Management v. FTC, a 2021 Supreme Court decision that stripped the FTC of its longstanding authority to seek monetary restitution for consumers directly under Section 13(b) of the FTC Act — a ruling that has meaningfully constrained the agency's ability to recover funds for victims in many cases since, even when it can still secure permanent bans and other injunctive relief.REVIEWED

Why a settlement nine years in the making still mattered

The lengthy span between the FTC's original 2015 complaint and Ramirez's 2024 settlement reflects how multi-defendant fraud cases can take many years to fully resolve, particularly when some defendants continue to contest the charges while others settle earlier — a pattern seen across several of the FTC's other business-opportunity and sweepstakes cases.REVIEWED Even without a monetary judgment attached in this final settlement, the permanent ban ensures Ramirez cannot return to sweepstakes marketing or prize-related consumer outreach in any form, closing off the specific channel through which the original scheme operated.REVIEWED

Why sweepstakes fraud remains a persistent category

Fake sweepstakes and prize-notification schemes have proven remarkably durable as a fraud category over decades, in part because the psychological appeal of an already-won prize creates urgency that overrides the skepticism a consumer might otherwise apply to an unsolicited offer.REVIEWED The requirement that recipients pay a fee before collecting supposedly guaranteed winnings is itself one of the clearest available warning signs, since legitimate sweepstakes and lotteries never require a winner to pay money upfront to receive a prize they have already won.REVIEWED Consumers who receive a letter, call, or email claiming they've won a prize and must pay a fee to collect it can treat that request alone as sufficient reason to disregard the offer entirely, and can report the contact to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.REVIEWED

Older adults are disproportionately targeted by sweepstakes and prize-notification fraud, according to FTC data on scam complaints generally, in part because personalized mailers of the kind described in the Ramirez complaint tend to reach an older, more traditionally mail-reliant population, and because the scheme's operators specifically designed their pitch around a written letter format rather than a phone call or email that might draw more immediate skepticism.REVIEWED Family members of older relatives can watch for unexpected mail claiming a large cash prize with an urgent payment deadline as a warning sign worth discussing directly, rather than assuming a formal-looking letter is inherently more trustworthy than an obvious scam call.REVIEWED

The reach of the underlying operation — victims across the United States and at least six other countries — also illustrates how mail-based sweepstakes fraud, unlike online scams that may target a narrower demographic familiar with a specific platform, can cross borders easily using nothing more sophisticated than a mailing list and a postage budget, making international cooperation among consumer-protection agencies a recurring feature of cases in this category.REVIEWED

Because the FTC's authority to secure monetary redress has narrowed since the AMG decision, permanent bans like the one imposed on Ramirez have become the agency's primary durable tool in cases like this one — a remedy that, while it cannot return money already lost, at minimum forecloses the specific individual's ability to run the same scheme again under his own name.REVIEWED

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