A North Carolina man received a 121-month prison sentence and three years of supervised release after running a multi-year operation that sold millions of elderly Americans’ personal details to Jamaican lottery fraud networks, generating millions in illicit revenue and causing significant victim losses.
Troy Murray, 57, of Hickory, North Carolina, was sentenced this week for what the court described as a seven-year operation in which he organized, curated, and sold lists of vulnerable Americans to overseas fraudsters. The lists contained names, phone numbers, physical addresses, and sometimes ages and email addresses of older adults, and the scheme ran from 2016 through 2023.
The court ordered Murray to forfeit $5,214,688.48 as part of the judgment and imposed the lengthy prison term for his role in the conspiracy. Prosecutors say he profited handsomely, pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year at the height of the business and more than $5.2 million over time.
Murray operated as a lead list broker for Jamaican lottery scammers, selling batches of 100 to 300 names for roughly $500 per list. Initially he took payments by wire transfer, but after being blocked by multiple money transmission services he switched to receiving prepaid gift cards from his buyers.
The broker was well known enough among Jamaican fraud rings that his pseudonym, “Steve Dixon,” was reportedly name-checked in a 2022 song lyric, a detail investigators used to corroborate the international reach of the operation. After taking payments, Murray used the profits to buy farm equipment, vehicles, and collectibles such as bars and coins made of precious metals, and he also funneled funds to a son to cover business and living expenses.
Investigators established that Murray transmitted at least 22,000 lead lists during the scheme, and those lists contained data on more than seven million elderly Americans. The criminal enterprise generated over $5.2 million for Murray while victim losses have been estimated to exceed $9.5 million in total.
In January 2026 Murray entered a guilty plea to one count of “conspiracy to commit wire fraud,” acknowledging his role in facilitating the transnational scams. Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division announced the case, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service led the investigation into how personal data was harvested and trafficked.
The prosecution was handled by Senior Litigation Counsel David Sullivan and Trial Attorney Ryan Norman of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, who presented evidence tying Murray’s list brokerage to the Jamaican lottery operations. Court records show the lists were used in direct outreach to elderly consumers—by phone, text, and email—who were misled into believing they had won prizes that did not exist.
https://x.com/DOJCrimDiv/status/2060041773099921808
This case highlights how data brokers can become critical nodes in fraud ecosystems when they knowingly supply targeted information about vulnerable populations. Authorities emphasized that disrupting the financial pipelines and the supply of prospective victims is central to preventing similar schemes and bringing organized fraudsters to justice.
