Saturday 24 March 2007
How the Winning Lottery Notification scam works
The lucky winner receives an email with a subject line ‘Winning Notification’ or ‘Award Notification’ or ‘Congratulation, You Have Won Lottery Award’ or something similar.
Within this email, the victim gets the stunning news that he a BIG lottery win.
To collect the winnings the victim has to contact a claims agent. Notice that the claims agent usually has use free email address (like yahoo, hotmail, etc).
Of course, officials from real lotteries never use free email addresses.
The victim contacts the claims agent and is asked to fill out the form to verify his true identity. And the unsuspecting victim provides all his personal details, address, date and place of birth, working details, next of kin details, plus a copy of passport and/or his driving license.
This givescriminals enough information to commit identity theft. But that’s only the part of the scam. When scammers receive all this data, they offer several options to collect the winnings. Either victim can go personally to collect the winnings or a cheque may be delivered by a courier company or transferred directly to victim’s bank account
If the cheque option is chosen, the victim is notified that he has to pay various upfront fees, such as notarization fee, clearance fee, insurance fee and the fee to the Courier company for secure delivery of the certified cheque, etc.
When all the fees are collected, often amounting to thousands of pounds, the victim never hears from the claims agents again.
If victim chooses the direct transfer option instead, he incurs the same notarization/clearance/insurance fees and then he is asked for his bank account details to receive the bank transfer . The victim may provide details of his real bank account where he keeps his money.
In a safer position are those victims who provide details of a newly opened, empty bank account for this purpose. But there is a still big possibility that this account will be used by scammers for fraudulent transactions in the near future.
If victim chooses to collect the money personally, he again has to pay upfront fees; this time it’s release fees etc. But there is no claims agent there to hand over his lottery winnings, because there never were any winnings.
You have not won a lottery you did not buy a ticket for. No lottery company has your email address or informs its winners by email. No lottery company asks for fees for the winnings to be handed over to you.
lottery scam
