Internet scams and frauds are on the rise! The quantity of scam
emails with various fraud schemes any email account receives
today is simply overwhelming! There is this infamous Nigerian
419 scam, which is by far the most widely circulated one. I wrote
about it in one of our ezine articles not long ago. You can read
about it here! And there are many other scams like Lottery, Letter
of Credit, money transfer, black money conversion, real estate,
fraudulent order and the list goes on and on.
Looking at my daily doze of scam letters, looks like, the lottery
scam seams to be gaining popularity among the con artists. This
scam is similar to other forward fee schemes, where the goal of
the con artist is to persuade an unsuspected victim to send an
advance payment for some dubious offers that the swindlers never
plan to fulfill.
Email Lottery Scam
The subject of the emails from an unknown source to you will,
probably show, something similar to, “Congratulation! You have
own a lottery”. With minor variations the text in most of these
letters is virtually identical.
The letter, usually, claims to be issued by a Lottery Company
based in some countries like The Netherlands, Switzerland, England,
Canada or the USA.
And then it says that you are one of many people randomly chosen
from all over the world to participate in a lottery of a very large
sum. You along with some others have won this lottery. You will
be asked to contact them immediately to claim your prize money.
Most certainly, the letter will also warn you to keep this as a
secret and will specify that the offer has a time limit.
If you contact them after receiving this letter; there are number
of variation how the thugs will try to swindle you. They are quite imaginative and nagaland state lotterydear lotterysometimes very innovative in their endeavors.
In general the idea is – you have to pay a fee before the lottery
company can release the amount to you. The pretexts are, usually,
an investigation company has to make sure that you are the right
person who won the lottery, as a foreigner you have to pay a tax
before you can get your prize and there is a processing and
handling fee that has to be paid before hand, etc.
Don’t think that these dubious offers are only sent by emails.
People received them by regular mails, by direct phone calls and
even by SMS.