Avoiding lottery scams
Monday October 13, 2008
Lottery scams are unfortunate, but are luckily quite easy to spot. There are many email scams out there and they mostly operate on the same sorts of principles. Throughout lottery history there have always been con artists trying to make a quick buck off of the hope of having won a major lottery prize, with the essential elements of lottery scams being hope, secrecy and then perceived obligation.
How many lottery scams start is with an unsolicited email that informs the recipient that they have won a lottery for a prize that is incredibly large - all that is required is a small deposit into a bank account in order to pay for transfer fees of the massive prize. As the fees may be a few thousand dollars and the prize may be hundreds of millions, many people think this is a reasonable enough deal.
The recipient of the email is then also asked to keep all transactions secret, supposedly to protect the transaction. This is really to cause them to avoid seeking advice until it is too late, which leads to the obligation stage. Once the person has poured thousands of dollars into this, they may be too embarrassed to tell anyone or else they may feel as if they have lost so much that they need to keep giving money in case there still is hope of coming out with millions of dollars.
There are several ways of identifying a lottery scam email, but the most important and obvious is that it will be an unsolicited email for a lottery you have not entered. A specific lottery like the Thursday Powerball, the Tuesday Oz Lotto and the Monday Lotto is unlikely to be mentioned - more often the "Australian lottery" or some equivalent is quoted.
If you receive a suspicious email, DELETE IT IMMEDIATELY. DO NOT RESPOND TO IT.
Please visit our lottery scams page to learn more signs of lottery scams or use our online entry facilities if you are interested in entering a lottery.
