Scam artists do a lot of their business by telephone, and as one heartland woman found out, phone calls with lofty promises often lead to big let-downs and drained bank accounts.

Because she does not want to be known as an easy mark, we are not identifying the victim, convinced by a caller that she had won $250,000.

"It made me anxious to be able to win something that large," the woman said.

But in order to collect her quarter-million dollar prize, she was told to wire two fee payments totaling $6,000. After wiring the money, the woman realized she had made a mistake.

"I don't have the money to waste like that, and I just know I've been taken."

Hoping to scare the scam artist into returning her money, the victim told the caller she had contacted the FBI. After that she received a call from someone pretending to be an FBI agent.

"He told me the FBI wouldn't have anything to do with it because this company calling me was authentic," she said.

Postal inspector Dave Margritz has taken reports like this before, but he says he is unable to offer this victim much hope of getting her money back.

"These people do it with wire transfers for a reason," Margritz told the victim. "They use the phones that they do, and they're located overseas or in Canada to make it very difficult."

Margritz also says scam artists will keep coming after victims who have paid before. He expects the scammers who contacted this woman to send her counterfeit bank checks with instructions to cash and them a fee.

"Watch out because strangers do not exist to make you rich," Margritz said. He offers these tips for consumers on how to protect themselves from being scammed: