 a lottery scam is a type of advance-fee fraud which begins with an unexpected email notification, phone call, or mailing (sometimes including a large check) explaining 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."how to identify and avoid hoax or fraudulent e-mail scams," microsoft many email lottery scams use the names of legitimate lottery organizations or other legitimate corporations/companies, but this does not mean the legitimate organizations are in any way involved with the scams. ==identification== there are several ways of identifying a fake lottery email: * unless someone has 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 the victims believe that they have won. * the scammer will ask the victims to pay a fee in advance to receive their prize. all genuine lotteries simply subtract any fees and tax from the prize. regardless of what the scammer claims this fee is for (such as courier charges, bank charges, or various imaginary certificates), these are all fabricated by the scammer to obtain money from victims. * scam lottery emails will nearly always come from free email accounts such as outlook, yahoo!, hotmail, live, msn, gmail etc. most email lottery scams are a type of advance fee fraud. a typical scam email will read like this: {| style="margin:auto; width:85%; border:1px solid; background:#faf4d0;" | prime lottery international customer service ref:abc/34085746305872/34 batch: 293/34/3473 winning notification: 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 
Fraud Lotteries Social_engineering_(computer_security) Spamming