There's no such thing as a Free Lunch

“Free cheese is only in a mousetrap” − I guess this Russian saying approximately corresponds with the above English one with a precise concretization of what kind of “lunch” and what its consequences were. It means that people in Ukraine do not actually believe in e-mail and internet congratulation letters related to them winning a lottery. Actually, my mail-service would mark something like this as a spam and suggest that it be deleted.

There are some genuine opportunities to squander your money though. For example, if you receive a letter that says you’ve won some amount of money (such as $10,000), and the only thing you’ve got to do to get it delivered is to send a small sum ($20) to the company’s fund. Of course you’ll never get your “winnings”.

You might as well play the lottery or gamble, but I’ve never seen a happy victor of those, except in one case. There was a guy who put some money on the date of my birthday and won (at 35-1 odds) in American Roulette (yes, you can play this in Ukraine!). But I didn’t actually participate. I was an astonished witness only, so I can say that I don’t have any definite experience in the lottery/gambling field and have never taken the possibility of winning seriously.

On the contrary, John seems to be well informed about Green Card Lottery scams and winners as if he had followed this information for a long time. No wonder he came to Ukraine in 2010 when as he said there were a lot of winners: he had to check what made our people win, and was trying to catch some splash of greatness staying here with the lucky men and women. Had his arrival anything to do with marriage agencies and the disbelief in them, who knows? We can only wonder.

Posted by Helen