Interesting... It must have died out because it was a scam. And because someone did something about it.
Post office based scams died out because it is cheaper for scammers to use the internet rather than having to buy postage to scam people.
Scam lotteries and Ponzi scams used to be sent via mail.
Like LeGaulois said it was popular 10-15 years ago in all countries.
Us oldies remember. I remember the days that computers used to have tape drives, 16kb of RAM, 1200 baud modems and cellphones couldn't SMS...prior to that there were no home computers or cellphones....