YOU'VE won £10,000! There's £40,000 waiting for you! We are waiting for you to claim your £500,000 prize!

Companies screaming at you to take oceans of cash off their hands - sounds pretty enticing, doesn't it?

Fortunately, most of us have long since become immune to the vaguely ludicrous promises made by mailshot shysters.

But while the majority of this junk mail gets consigned to the bin, there is an extremely vulnerable group of people suffering at the hands of the opportunists.

The companies prey on people's weaknesses - be it loneliness, financial trouble or just pure innocence.

And the Office of Fair Trading, which ran a Scams Awareness Month earlier this year, estimates more than 500,000 people fall victim to these scams every year, collectively losing £320m.

The Daily Echo met with one Bournemouth pensioner, a widow who lives alone, who ended up £10,000 in debt after she began to reply to the offers.

"I'm only on a state pension, so it seemed a way to get a holiday or a new car," she said.

"I should have realised they are crooks but they only needed to make me one of their offers and I was hooked on their line.

"One woman told me I always get hurt because I trust people, but they haven't got my principles or integrity."

After responding to an attractive offer for £10,000 some eight years ago, the 83-year-old grandmother began to receive stacks of mail.

She ended up on what is cruelly known in the trade as the Suckers' List.

Reply to one of the speculative mails and you'll end up on it, and the lists become a priceless commodity of likely targets.

As things began to spiral out of control, the pensioner began sending out hundreds of pounds each week, in cheque, cash or card payments. But despite thinking they were one-offs, between May and August 2005, she counted 40 disputed transactions on her card statements.

She even received a call from a law enforcement officer in Toronto to tell her they had stopped one of her cheques to a company in Canada.

Unsurprisingly, in her eight years of heartache, the pensioner has not won a penny of the thousands supposedly up for grabs.

"I just had to win to try and get out of the mess," she said.

"I have to keep on repeating to myself I can't get something for nothing'."

Andy Sherriff, principal officer for Bournemouth trading standards, said the pensioner's case was extreme, but sadly not rare.

He said: "As soon as you get targeted the amount of mail increases dramatically.

"Strangely, people don't take this as a sign they are being ripped off but that they are wanted or are important to someone.

"They are lured into that way of thinking as that is what the people who create the scams play on."

As for addressing the problem mail, there is only one solution - bin it.

"How can you be a winner to something you've never entered? Why would someone want to give you a huge amount of money?" said Mr Sherriff.

"It takes a great deal of self-discipline not to reply, but you do gradually get taken off the lists if you don't respond."