Seventy people in Portugal received news that made no sense. A man had died, and their names were in his will.
None of them knew who he was. As far as they could tell, they had never met him.
Most of the 70 did not believe it at first. A Portuguese lawyer said the news came as a shock, and some of the heirs feared they were being scammed. One of them, a 76-year-old woman named Helena, put it simply.
“Every day you hear of pranks people play on old people,” she said.
To many of them, it had all the marks of a con: a letter out of the blue, an inheritance, and a dead stranger.
Their suspicion made sense. In Portugal, leaving a will is unusual to begin with. “We don't have a tradition of wills in Portugal,” explained a lawyer from the Portuguese Law Association.
So who was the man behind this one?
His name was Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara. He was born in 1959 into a wealthy Lisbon family, and he was raised by a nanny.
He never married and had no children. He never held a job. He lived a quiet, solitary life at home, reading and listening to music.
He died of natural causes at just 42.
He could have left his estate to almost anyone: a relative, a friend, a charity. Instead, his will named 70 people he had never met.
Not one of them could say why they had been chosen. And the one man who could explain it was gone.