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 of course never receive any lottery payment. 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. Grifter redirects here. ...

There are several ways to recognise a fake lottery email:

• Unless you have bought a ticket, you 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: An advance fee fraud is a confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain. ...

 PRIME LOTTERY INTERNATIONAL Customer Service Ref:ABC/34085746305872/34 Batch: 293/34/3473 

 WINNING NOTIFICATION: 

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. Grifter redirects here. ... Sundance Vacations, also known as Travel Advantage Network, is a travel agency which during the year 2005 frequently offered sums of around $1000 or £1200 to random web surfers. ...

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. There are very few or no other articles that link to this one. ...

This article is about electronic spam. ... // A possible 19th century mass telegraph In the late 19th Century Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. ... The Network Abuse Clearinghouse assembles data on what its sponsors see as misuse of the Internet. ... E-mail spam, also known as bulk e-mail or junk e-mail is a subset of spam that involves sending nearly identical messages to numerous recipients by e-mail. ... Address munging is the practice of disguising, or munging, an e-mail address to prevent it being automatically collected and used as a target for people and organizations who send unsolicited bulk e-mail. ... Bulk email software is software that is used to send email in large quantities. ... Dictionary spamming is a spamming technique where spammers attempt to guess E-mail addresses by using a dictionary attack based on adding plausible names as prefixes to known domain names. ... A Directory Harvest Attack or DHA is a technique used by spammers in an attempt to find e-mail addresses. ... A DNS Blacklist, or DNSBL (definition below), is a means by which an Internet site may publish a list of IP addresses that some people may want to avoid and in a format which can be easily queried by computer programs on the Internet. ... A spambot is a program designed to collect, or harvest, e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam. ... An auto-dialer is an electronic device that can automatically dial telephone numbers to communicate between any two points in the telephone, mobile phone and pager networks. ... Flyposting is the act of placing advertising posters or flyers in illegal places. ... Messaging spam, sometimes called SPIM, is a type of spam targeting users of instant messaging services. ... Mobile phone spam is a form of spamming directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. ... Newsgroup spam is a type of spamming where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. ... Telemarketing office Telemarketing is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson uses the telephone to solicit prospective customers to buy products or services. ... VoIP spam is an as-yet-nonexistent problem which has nonetheless received a great deal of attention from marketers and the trade press. ... To prevent e-mail spam, both end users and administrators of e-mail systems use various anti-spam techniques. ... Disposable email addressing (DEA) refers to an alternative way of sharing and managing email addressing. ... Ensuring a valid identity on an e-mail has become a vital first step in stopping spam, forgery, fraud, and even more serious crimes. ... SORBS (Spam and Open Relay Blocking System) is a controversial open proxy and open mail relay DNSBL. It has been augmented with complementary lists that include various other classes of hosts, allowing for customized email rejection by its users. ... SpamCop is a free spam reporting service, allowing recipients of unsolicited bulk email (UBE) and unsolicited commercial email (UCE) to report the offense to the senders Internet Service Provider (ISP), and sometimes their web host. ... The Spamhaus Project is a completely volunteer effort founded by Steve Linford in 1998 that aims to track e-mail spammers and spam-related activity. ... List poisoning is a tactic for detecting or diverting e-mail spammers by tricking them into including invalid addresses into mailing lists. ... Bayesian spam filtering (pronounced Bays-ee-en, IPA pronunciation: , after Rev. ... Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page... Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... A Google bomb (also referred to as a link bomb) is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. ... Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical Search engine optimization (SEO) technique. ... On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web pages that all hyperlink to every other page in the group. ... Referer spam is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Link spam (also called blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamming or spamdexing that recently became publicized most often when targeting weblogs (or blogs), but also affects wikis (where it is often called wikispam), guestbooks, and online discussion boards. ... Sping is short for ping spam. Pings are messages sent from blog and publishing tools to a centralized network service (Ping Server) providing notification of newly published posts or content. ... A webring in general is a collection of websites from around the Internet joined together in a circular structure. ... URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, domain redirection and domain forwarding, is a technique on the World Wide Web for making a web page available under many URLs. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... An advance fee fraud is a confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain. ... Make money fast is a title of an electronically forwarded chain letter which became so infamous that the term is now used to describe all sorts of chain letters forwarded over the Internet, by e-mail spam or Usenet newsgroups. ... Microcap stock fraud, also known as microcap fraud, is a form of securities fraud involving stocks of microcap companies, generally defined as having a market capitalization of under $250 million. ... This phishing attempt, disguised as an official email from a (fictional) bank, attempts to trick the banks members into giving away their account information by confirming it at the phishers linked website. ... There are very few or no other articles that link to this one. ...

External links

• World Lottery Association warns of foreign lottery fraud risks, the World Lottery Association
• [http://www.scamdex.com/Lottery-index.html Scamdex Lottery Scam Database