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Over the last few years the Bridgewater Police
Department has since an increase in a crime that has become known as a "Lottery
Scam." Read below to see what Wikipedia describes as a Lottery Scam:
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A typical lottery
scam begins with an unexpected email notification that "You have won!" a
large sum of money in a lottery. The recipient of the message — the target of
the scam — is usually told to keep the notice secret, "due to a mix-up in some
of the names and numbers," and to contact a "claims agent." After contacting the
agent, the target of the scam will be asked to pay "processing fees" or
"transfer charges" so that the winnings can be distributed, but will never
receive any lottery payment.[1]
Many email lottery scams use the names of legitimate lottery
organizations, but this does not mean the legitimate organizations are in any
way involved with the scams.
There are several ways to
recognize a fake lottery email:
-
Unless a person have bought a
ticket, one cannot have won a prize. There are no such things as "email" draws
or any other lottery where "no tickets were sold". This is simply another
invention by the scammer to make you believe you've won.
-
The scammer will ask you to pay
a fee before you can receive your prize. It is illegal for a real lottery to
charge any sort of fee. It doesn't matter what they say this fee is for
(courier charges, bank charges, various imaginary certificates — these are all
made up by the scammer to get money out of you). All real lotteries subtracts
any fee and tax from the prize. They never ask you to pay it in advance.
-
Scam lottery emails will nearly
always come from free email accounts such as
Yahoo!,
Hotmail,
MSN, etc, and no
real business will use a free email account.
Email lottery scams are a type of
advance fee fraud. A typical scam email will read like this:
PRIME LOTTERY INTERNATIONAL
Customer Service
Ref:ABC/34085746305872/34
Batch: 293/34/3473
WINNING NOTIFICATION: We
happily announce to you the draw of the UK-LOTTO Sweepstake Lottery
International programs held on the 27th of March, 2004 in Johannesburg,
South Africa. Your e-mail address attached to ticket number: 564 75600545188
with Serial number 5368/02 drew the lucky numbers: 19-6-26-17-35-7, which
subsequently won you the lottery in the 2nd category.
You have therefore been
approved to claim a total sum of US$2,500,000.00 (Two million, Five Hundred
Thousand United States Dollars)in cash credited to file ktu/9023118308/03.This
is from a total cash prize of U.S $ 2.5 Million dollars, shared amongst the
first nine (9) luckywinners in this category.
All participants were
selected randomly from World Wide Web site through computer draw system and
extracted from over 100,000 companies. This promotion takes place annually.
Please note that your lucky winning number falls within our European booklet
representative office in Europe as indicated in your play coupon. In view of
this, your U.S$2,500,000.00 (Two million, Five Hundred Thousand United
States Dollars) would be released to you by our payment office in Europe.
Our European agent will
immediately commence the process to facilitate the release of your funds as
soon as you contact him. For security reasons, you are advised to keep your
winning information confidential till your claims is processed and your
money remitted to you in whatever manner you deem fit to claim your prize.
This is part of our
precautionary measure to avoid double claiming and unwarranted abuse of this
program by some unscrupulous elements. Please be warned.
To file for your claim,
please contact our fiduciary agent: Mr Richard Diwar Email:dywar2@example.com
To avoid unnecessary
delays and complications, please quote your reference/batch numbers in any
correspondence with us or our designated agent.
Congratulations once more
from all members and staffs of this program. Thank you for being part of our
promotional lottery program.
Sincerely,
SIR HENRY BERNARD
UK-LOTTO Co-ordinator |
Another type of lottery scam
is a
scam email or web page that tells the recipient he has a sum of money in the
lottery. The recipient is instructed to contact an agent very quickly, in some
cases offering extra prizes (such as a 7 Day/6 Night Bahamas Cruise Vacation,
by
Sundance Vacations if the user rings within 4 minutes). After contacting the
"agent", the recipient will be asked to come to an office, where during one hour
or more, the conditions of receiving the offer are revealed. For example, the
prize recipient is encouraged to spend as much as 30 times the prize money in
order to receive the prize itself. In other words, although the offer is in fact
genuine, it is really only a discount of a few percent on an extremely expensive
purchase. This type of scam is legal in many jurisdictions.
Sometimes Lottery scam messages
are sent by ordinary mail; their content and style is similar to the e-mail
versions. For example some scams by letter misuse the names of the legal Spanish
lotteries El Gordo and La Primitiva.
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The Bridgewater Police
Department requests all residents that receive these types to e-mails or letters
to be aware that it is entirely a scam. |
