Three of the 30 people implicated in an alleged international lottery scam were remanded into custody when they appeared in the Half-Way-Tree Resident Magistrate’s Court yesterday.

Jomo Bernard and Shanon Ricketts of Bogue Estate, St James, and Cleopatra Bent, who is from Pitfour, also in St James, were all denied bail when they appeared before presiding magistrate Frank Williams. All three are facing a charge of conspiracy to defraud.

According to the prosecution, Bernard is believed to be the mastermind behind the entire scam which operates out of Montego Bay. All three are scheduled to return to court on March 2.

According to the prosecution, all three were charged following police raids carried out on 13 locations in Hanover and St James last week. The raids were led by cops from Operation Kingfish with assistance from the Fraud Squad, Financial Investigation Division, Special Anti-Crime Task Force, Mobile Reserve, Organised Crime Division, Police Area One, and the Jamaica Defence Force.

The police said that during the raids they recovered banking documents and phone records that implicated the 30 persons.

According to the police, the perpetrators of the scam would obtain the names and addresses of telemarketing customers who had purchased sweepstake tickets online. They would then contact these customers by telephone and inform them that they had won the lottery. These customers would then be told to pay processing fees of up to US$5,000.

The lottery scam has been blamed for a significant number of the more than 200 murders committed in St James over the last 14 months.