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KTLA reports Pomona police are searching for a man and woman filmed beside Armida Flores, 82, before she handed over $2,500 in a lottery ticket scam.
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KTLAAccording to KTLA, police in Pomona are searching for a man and a woman accused of swindling an 82-year-old woman out of $2,500 using a lottery ticket scam.
Surveillance footage from September 10 shows the pair walking with the victim, identified as Armida Flores, before taking her money and abandoning her. The Pomona Police Department says the suspects targeted her, though the feed summary does not describe how the approach began or what was said to gain her trust.
The video places the suspects beside Flores before the exchange of money. That sequence points to a walk-and-talk approach, the kind where a stranger keeps a target moving and engaged long enough to steer them toward handing over cash. The scam depends on that closeness. Once the money changes hands, the suspects leave, and the footage ends there.
The feed summary does not say what story the suspects told Flores, whether a supposed winning ticket was shown to her, or how the $2,500 was physically handed over. It does not say whether the suspects arrived by car, whether anyone else witnessed the encounter, or whether Pomona police have released images of the pair beyond the surveillance clip mentioned.
Only Pomona police and anyone who saw the encounter can answer what happened between the moment the suspects approached Flores and the moment they walked away with her money.
Lottery ticket scams targeting older adults tend to follow a pattern: a stranger claims to hold a winning ticket, says they cannot cash it themselves for some reason, and offers to split the prize in exchange for cash up front or as a show of good faith. Whether that is the version used on Flores is not stated in what KTLA has published so far.
Anyone in the Pomona area who recognizes the man and woman in the surveillance footage, or who was approached with a similar lottery ticket story around September 10, has information police do not yet have. What exactly did the suspects tell Armida Flores to get her to hand over $2,500?
