Ex-TV news anchor loses $60K after scammers said she won millions in Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes
Linda Coble, a former TV news anchor in Hawaii, lost nearly $60,000 to scammers who convinced her she had won a Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. The scammers built a false sense of trust through consistent communication and fake documentation. It wasn't until they demanded more money that she realized she had been conned.
- ▪Linda Coble, 79, was targeted by scammers posing as Publishers Clearing House representatives.
- ▪Over several weeks, she sent money to cover taxes and fees for a supposed $5.5 million prize.
- ▪Coble lost a total of $60,000 before realizing it was a scam.
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| Original publisher | New York Post |
| Canonical URL | https://nypost.com/2026/05/20/media/ex-tv-news-anchor-loses-60k-in-publishers-clearing-house-scam/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 10:55:47 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T14:59:17.439Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T15:05:43.484Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | WB7fcO1_U3jT |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Media Ex-TV news anchor loses $60K after scammers said she won millions in Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes By Ariel Zilber Published May 20, 2026, 10:55 a.m. ET See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Post on Google A former Hawaii TV news anchor says she was left feeling “ashamed” after scammers conned her out of nearly $60,000 with a fake Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes prize. Linda Coble, 79, who made history as Hawaii’s first female TV anchor in 1971, said she fell victim to an elaborate scam after receiving a phone call in March from a man identifying himself as “Mike Diamond” from US Customs. “I had won the sweepstakes at Publishers Clearing House — $5,500,000,” Coble told Hawaii News Now.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at New York Post.
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