yahoo mail lottery scam?

Question

xe.com

Divison of Yahoo Internet Lottery

& nbsp; Payment No. M30911
Yahoo! News
Date: 6th March,2007.

Yahoo! Mail Lottery

PAY THE AMOUNT OF: EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND BRITISH POUNDS *£800,000.00*

AUTHORIZED BY: YAHOO MAIL INC.
[e-mail]
CONGRATULATIONS !!!!
YOU WON £800.000.00 POUNDS!

YOU HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED AS THE ONE OF 12 TOP LUCKY WINNERS !!!

Yahoo! Mail gives members random cash prizes. Today, your account is randomly selected as the one of 12 top winners accounts who will get cash prizes from us.We are happy to inform you that you have won a prize money of (Eight Hundred Thousand Great British Pounds (£800,000.00 GBP) for the month of MARCH,2007 lottery win promotion which is organized by yahoo messenger .com every month.

YAHOO, collects all the mail id of the people that are online and offline on yahoo messenger, among the millions that subscribe to yahoo messenger and among other email addresses on microsoft worldwide.We only select five people every month as our winners through electronic balloting System without the winner applying,we are congratulating you for been one of the people selected.All participant were selected through a computer balloting system drawn from Nine hundred thousand E-mail addresses from Canada, Australia, United States, Asia, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Oceania as part of our international promotions program which is conducted annually.

This Lottery was promoted and sponsored by a conglomorate of some
multinational companies as part of their social responsibility to the
citizens in the commmunities where they have operational base.
Further more your details(e-mail address) falls within our British representative office in United Kingdom , as indicated in your play coupon and your prize of £800,000.00 GBP will be released to you from this regional branch office in UK.

We hope with part of your prize, you will participate in our end of year
high stakes for £1.3 Billion GBP international draw.
HOW TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE
These are your identification numbers.......................

Batch number.....................Lwh 09445
Lotto number.......................Lwh09446
Winning number...................Lwh09447

To begin your claims, kindly contact the Yahoo Financial Controller, Dr. John Henry at this email address( [e-mail] ) You are required to forward him with the following details:

1.FULL NAME..........................................
2.COUNTRY OF ORIGIN...........................
3.PRESENT ADRESS...............................
4.POSTCODE...........................................
5.DIRTH OF BIRTH...................................
6.OCCUPATION.........................................
7.SEX........................................................
8.TELEPHONE NUMBER..............................
9.FAX NUMBER(IF ANY).............................
10.MARITAL STATUS.................................
11.WINNING NUMBER,BATCH NUMBER AND LOTTO NUMBER..........

As soon as you contact the Financial Controller, he will advise you on what to do in order to get your prize money.

For security reasons, we advice all winners to keep this information
confidential from the public until your claim is processed and your
prize released to you. This is part of our security protocol to avoid
double claiming and unwarranted taking advantage of this programme by non-participant or unofficial personnel.

Congratulations once more!!

Yours Sincerely,
Prakash Photo
DR. MARTIN KEVIN(PHD)
LOTTO CO-ORDINATOR.
The Yahoo.com staff
Yahoo.com http://www.yahoo.com

xe.com

Answer 1

Sorry, it's a scam. It is impossible to win a lottery if you did not buy a ticket. There is no such thing as a lottery of email addresses or Yahoo! Messenger ID's... and Yahoo! doesn't run any lotteries.

See the links below for a lot more info on Yahoo Lottery scam emails...

Answer 2

It is a scam! There is no Overseas Lottery International, YAHOO & MSN Lotteries, Yahoo online dept., UK (United Kingdom) Lottery, Netherlands Lottery, British Lottery, Thunderball Online Lottery in the UK, Australian Lottery, Spanish Lottery, Yahoo Lottery Microsoft Lottery (emmulating from the UK or anywhere else) or any other form of lottery you can win without buying a ticket. While some people might only copy and paste such email to their answer with a brief take on it, I will go into detail because I'm tired of this trash, as several of my friends have lost their a$$es to this scam. This is about as far away from legitimate as anything can get, whether it be a contest, promotion, or whatever.

There exists a certain form of immoral degenerate that trolls the internet searching for suckers who believe that they have gotten very lucky and won a lottery which they have never entered. They will probably entice you to send an advance fee to claim your non-existant winnings and if you do send this money, you can kiss it goodbye. The money will likely be en-route to Nigeria, a cesspool of fraud that has been the center of these types of fraud over the last few decades.

The best thing to do is to delete such emails immediately and to never reply to them. If you even reply, you risk having your email inbox flooded. If you call these people, expect to be harrassed over the phone at all hours of the night! In some cases, people who travel to claim their winnings in Nigeria are taken hostage, and in worse-case scenarios are killed when whoever is paying ransom payments exhausts their money supply. If anything online sounds to good to be true it always is buddy.

By the way, I have kind of become an anti-scam activists due to the fact that I have many friends who have had their identities and life savings stolen from them via these methods.

This is simply advance fee fraud (a prevalent type of fraud which continously asks for money to cover unforseen expenses) and is intended to drain your bank account, promising money that simply does not exist. Hopefully, this answers your question.

If you have any more questions, do a yahoo search on lottery scams, nigeria 419 scams, internet fraud, or advance fee fraud. You can also read more about this at www.secretservice.gov and www.419eater.com!

If you have lost money you should report it to the U.S. Secret Service at www.secretservice.gov

Now you know the basics of Advance Fee Fraud, a multi-million dollar industry that costs honest people their life savings everyday. Be happy you weren't duped by this scam!

I hope this is helpful, because I could sure use a best answer! I would appreciate it!

Answer 3

Fraudulent (Scam) Emails – what to do first

Lottery scam (fraudulent) emails are increasing at an alarming rate.

Scam emails try to persuade the email receiver to submit personal information or to part with money as an up front payment in order to release a winning lottery prize.

As a general rule, if you have not purchased a ticket for the UK National Lottery, you won’t have won a prize, and you should treat the email with absolute caution.

The following points are some things to look for in order to identify a fraudulent email:

* If the email says ‘Winning Notification’ or ‘Lottery Sweep Stake’ in the text, the email you’ve received is not from UK National Lottery;
* We don’t tell players how much they've won in an email; and
* We don’t ask for any Player information like name, address or bank details on an email.

NEVER open emails from these people with attachments, they can get the personal information off your computer!! Including bank account information as well as credit cards. If your winnings show to be in another country always remember only residents of that country are qualified to win. Hope this helps!

Answer 4

Look at the questions I have answered in gambling on this site in my info. There are so many winners there could not be enough money to pay them all.There is no International Lottery.This is a Nigeria scam. Yahoo/MSN, U.K. and Australian lotteries, football lotteries from the same counties, Global-Link, World Poverty, Microsoft, Free Lotto, which now seems to have it's own people answering gambling questions on this site claiming they have won which is a total lie, and hundreds more. I am a retired Police Officer that has years of experience investigating Internet scams and frauds. This is an old one. The common link to them getting your email is on line surveys. Yahoo does not give it's stock holders money away nor does it give it's email subscribers address's to lotteries. The only way to win in a lottery is to buy a ticket, if you didn't you could not possibly win. Here is the website of the 17 nation law enforcement task force that investigates cross border Internet crime. You may file a complaint there. www.econsumer.gov. Also go to www.ripoffreport.com and browse complaints and you will find many having the same doubts as yourself about these scams. Below is a typical scam and how they work it. They just go under a thousand different names. They are asking you to send a prepayment to collect your winnings and they want you to send it by a money wire service. Lotteries do not just pick your name out of thin air, and just so happen to have your email also. No Internet service provider gives their email list out to lotteries. If you did not pay to play you could not possibly win.

recieved letter of winning $65000.00 Pacific Player International lotteries,please contact claims agent miss linda strong at 204-951-7582. Second letter came with a check for the amount of $2,470.00 To deposited in my bank account for processing fee,a week later check cleared my bank. I contacted my claims agent over the phone she advise me to wire the balance of $2,341.00 to a Mr Edward Culwell in New York,New York.I called miss linda strong to advise her of the western union confirmation number,to date can not get in touch with linda strong just her voice mail, I know now that it was all a RIP-OFF and now Iam in the hole with $2,470.00 with my bank.... Please send HELP... THANK YOU VERY MUCH

Answer 5

Scam.

Answer 6

This is known as phishing. If you contact them, you will be giving them your personal info, and it will only be a matter of time that they will be asking for bank account info. 1.3 billion? That's absolutely ridiculous, nobody just hands out lottery prizes to people who never entered. Check out these sites, but I would just delete the email, or mark it as spam.

Answer 7

totally fraud.