Philipsburg:--- UTS informs its customers that there are individuals abroad attempting to commit fraud on the island by abusing the local telephone systems. Several customers have reported being contacted on their telephone numbers in an attempt to trick the customer into sending money abroad. The calls generally seem to originate from the United Kingdom and the customers are misled into believing that they have won large sums of money in a foreign lottery. Following this first contact, the customer is called again by a different representative and asked to send a substantial cash deposit so that they may collect their winnings. UTS advises customers to exercise caution if contacted by an unknown party soliciting funds in order to receive prize money or winnings of any kind. "This type of scam has been going on for many years using the postal system and eventually email was used as a new medium to mislead the victims. Now these con-artists have graduated to a new means of communicating with their targets and have started using the telephone system," says UTS Marketing and Communications Officer, Ivy Lambert. "Unfortunately, we have had some customers who have been contacted in an attempt to mislead them. Luckily they were aware what was going on and brought these attempts to our attention. This is a world-wide phenomenon and is not only limited to our island or our UTS phone systems. By making this announcement, we want to do what we can to create awareness of this problem to avoid anyone falling victim to this kind of trickery."