WATCH OUT, for scam emails letters or phone calls, that tell you that you have won a major prize in a fake lottery. They vary in content but most mention winning lots of money and needing somehow to get it to you in some convoluted transaction.  

Thousands of people have lost money – don’t let the next one be you! 

The criminals usually want two things - your money and your identity.  Your identity is as important, or perhaps even more important, than any money you send them. They may be able to obtain your identity when you open any email from them, if it contains a Trojan horse or Spyware;  scam emails sometimes do. 

They quote plausible sounding names such as “Euro - Afro American Sweepstake”, in an attempt to sound genuine. They mention names of perfectly respectable companies such as The National Lottery or Virtual World Direct (a UK syndicate) or some other bona fide company, in an attempt to make themselves look legitimate. 

 How does it work?

If you have responded to a phone call or letter or email, your name will have been added to a 'sucker list' which is made available to numerous scam operators. 

You might then receive an unsolicited phone call or mail contact congratulating you on  winning the 'big prize' in a national lottery.

You will be told that before you can claim the prize, you must send money to pay for items like bank charges, taxes and processing fees.

Thousands of people Worldwide have already received unsolicited phone calls and sent money to fraudulent lottery schemes. In particular, The  Office of Fair Trading in the United Kingdom is aware of people who have lost up to £300,000, as they respond to more and more telephone calls, emails and letters demanding payments to cover costs in order to receive their prize. The prizes do not exist, and they never receive any winnings in return for their cash.

 Who are behind these scams?

Invariably highly organised gangs based in countries other than the one's they are defrauding. It is widely acknowledged that there are large number of Canadian syndicates involved, specifically targeting the USA and Europe. Also, according to police investigators many criminals are believed to be from Middle Eastern and African countries.

Authorities and Governments are taking the threat very seriously and have put major resources into tackling the problem. Criminal networks taken down in the past have uncovered huge lists of victims, showing how much they have paid, when they were last contacted and when they are due to be contacted again.

 The Best course of action? 

Many people are asking us what can be done about this. The sad fact is that there are so many scams, that the authorities cannot chase them all. We suggest you:  

1.       Do nothing, just delete the emails or dispose of any letters. Ignore telephone calls or tell them they have the wrong number. Do NOT answer any of their questions or provide ANY personal details.

2.       DO NOT complete their offline or online claim forms.

3.       Make sure  family and friends are aware.

4.       Report the incident to your local law enforcement authority if the matter has got out of hand.

10 Tips To Spot a Lottery Scam

 1. What email address did the email come from? Is it a real lottery company, or LottoWin@hotmail.com? Try taking the bit after the @ sign, put www. in front of it and type that into your web browser. See where it takes you. If it's not a lottery organiser, that could be a bad sign.

 2. Scammers often fake the sender’s address but they need you to contact them somehow so they often include an email address to reply to. Do the same test as above on that email address. No genuine lottery company would use a free email account to correspond with jackpot winners. 

3. How good is the grammar and spelling in the email? Lottery scam emails are often poorly constructed and by person with the bad hold off the writted wordings and grammatics and with amany miss-steaks!!

4. Did you pay to enter this lottery? There are free online lottery sites, but you'd know if you entered one. No company goes around giving jackpot millions out randomly. 

5. Where did they get your email address? Unless you entered an online lottery providing your email address, how did they obtain your email?

6. Are they asking for a fee to process your winnings? A guaranteed sign of a scam. No genuine lottery organiser would ask you to pay them before they give you a prize.

 7. Are they asking for bank or credit card details or other confidential information in order to pay your winnings? Beware of links which could lead you to so-called 'spoof sites' set up to extract information from you, like updating personal records which could provide the means to reach or even access your account.  

8. Do a search on the internet for the claimed name of the company, and the names of people mentioned in the email. Use this search in conjunction with the others, because as mentioned above, they quote genuine company names.

 9. Is a phone number provided? Don't ring it. Try doing a reverse phone number search (see internet for websites that provide this service). If it turns out to be mobile cellphone number, that's another bad sign. 

10. Is there a street address provided? Search the internet for this specific address, or just the street name and see what comes up. Do the company and street name match-up?

   Want To Know More? 

 ……anything that sounds too good to be true, probably is.

Notes

TROJAN HORSE:  A computer program is either hidden inside another program or that masquerades as something it is not in order to trick potential users into running it. For example a program that appears to be a game or image file but in reality performs some other function.
SPYWARE:  Software that reveals identity of user. Surreptitiously installed on a hard disk without the user's knowledge and relays encoded information on his or her identity and Internet use via an Internet connection.