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Bill Moss is at it again.

Marco Island’s city manager now apparently is running a Nigerian-style sweepstakes scam, hoping to raise money to pay for improvements to Marco’s aging infrastructure.

Word of the scam leaked out of City Hall last week. It works like this:

Lucky “winners” all over America open their mail and find a note naming them as sweeps drawing winners. City sources say they are advised to deposit the checks, often for thousands of dollars, then phone a number to get details of what’s next.

What’s next probably is an instruction to give their charge card number or to send a check before they can get the balance of a big sweepstakes payment. Some of the lucky winners are promised a prize of up to $317,000.

Of course they didn’t win anything. This Moss-inspired trick should bring in millions, while fleecing the bank accounts of hundreds of lonely widows and hapless pensioners.

That leaked city memo reports that, “a woman from another state called to complain that our check for $18,000 did not clear her bank when deposited. Other calls from around the county ... clarified the issue.”

Well, well, well. It seems it’s no longer far-fetched to blame Bill Moss for everything from no-see-ums to people ignoring no-wake zones. Clearly this sweepstakes scam has Mr. Moss’s nimble fingerprints all over it.

The evidence:

• The checks look very authentic, just like all the other checks Marco’s City Hall writes.

• The scam is wily enough to have secret controls on it so that when sweepstakes “winners” try to deposit the first prize checks —- the ones that suck them into the scheme —- controls built in by Mr. Moss bar the transactions. It’s downright diabolical.

• Moss knows that people are bombarded daily with contests, sweepstakes entry forms, come-ons, teases and something-for-nothing offers, so our guard is eased, our defenses are down. He knows that “there’s a sucker born every minute.”

In fact, P. T. Barnum, who is credited with that quote, never said it. Bill Moss said it, using an alias, David Hannum, who was a 19th century banker in Syracuse, N.Y. It’s true — you can look it up at www.historybuff.com.

Moss simply decided to use the foibles of human nature to raise a lot of money for Marco. I mean, with the property tax cuts and real estate prices way down, Moss figured a little scam would be a lot easier to pull off than to get other funds out of a city council, whose membership could change come January. The final proof we need to know that the Moss- inspired sweepstakes scam is no joke is that he has said so himself.

In a memo to city council members, Mr. Moss wrote: “Did you know that the City of Marco Island has a world-wide sweepstakes with people winning $317,000?”

There it is.

Now, what should be done about this?

Our choices:

• Assemble at City Hall with flaming torches and war drums and drive him into exile in the Everglades. (Tough, I know, but times are tough.)

• Confiscate his library card, beach pass and buy-one-get-one free card from Hoots. (This penalty is designed to emulate the famous Chinese death by a thousand cuts.)

• Give him a huge raise in pay, the key to the City and a lifetime pass to the Marco Movies. (It’s the least we can do to repay him for using other people’s money to pay for our much-needed city improvements.)

And if you believe any of this, you should enter the sweepstakes immediately, convinced that you are guaranteed to win.

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Chris is a former news anchor for CNN and for ABC-TV stations in Washington DC, Atlanta and Houston. E-mail: chris@chriscurle.com.