A friend of mine got the following email recently. He would like to know if its legimate or a fraud.?

Question

Yahoo Lottery
Incoperation
Baley House, Har Road
Sutton, Greater London
SM1 4te
United Kingdom


This is to inform you that you have won a prize money of FIVE HUNDRED
THOUSAND POUNDS (£500.000.00) for the month of March 2007 Lottery
promotion which is organized by YAHOO LOTTERY INC & WINDOWS LIVE.

YAHOO & MICROSOFT WINDOWS, collects all the email addresses of the
people that are active online, among the millions that subscribed to
Yahoo and Hotmail we only select five people every Month as our winners
through electronic balloting System without the winner applying,we
congratulate you for being one of the people selected.

PAYMENT OF PRIZE AND CLAIM

You are to contact your Claims Agent on or before your date of
Claim, Winners Shall be paid in accordance with his/her Settlement
Centre.
Yahoo Lottery Prize must be claimed no later than 15 days from date of
Draw Notification after the Draw date in which Prize has won.
There is more to the email

Answer 1

S C A M!!!!

Answer 2

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 3

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 4

While many people would love to say you can win thousands, millions of dollars etc by doing jack sh*t it's blatantly and painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain that anything like this is going to be a fake or some kind of fishing scam.

I'm just amazed that the word Nigeria isn't in there somewhere...

Man wouldn't it be great if you could sue the originators of these e-mails to make them deliver what they promise/use as bait to sucker people into their fruadulent schemes....

Answer 5

Its a freaking FRUAD i was just scamed out of 2900 dollars by some ******* british people from the united kingdom please excuse my language but im pissed. They claimed to be from The Coco-cola company and my email was choosen from yahoo data base i wish i could sue yahoo. But anyway they told me i had to pay 600 dollars to a courier company then told me i had to pay 2100 dollars for a security clearence i did it like a damn fool then they gone tell me i have to pay for a hotel and the flight to get the notary person to the USA so i told them HELL NO!!!!!! send my money back and never heard from them again.I ve been talking to lawyers trying to getn some one to take the case and go after yahoo but im having no luck, if you have someone who would take the case my email is [e-mail].

Answer 6

Anything and everything like that is fraud. You need to enter a contest to win there is no magic you're the lucky chosen one contests.

Answer 7

There are alot of scams out there and alot have to do with Big Names.Do not even open these kind of emails.

Answer 8

Delete it - we get thousands of these. Don't reply to them, don't hand over any payment and don't give them any personal information. Delete and forget.

Answer 9

Be careful, they just want your personal information. It's a fraud.

Answer 10

you need to email yahoo and let then know whats going on.. forward the email to them. this way it will help to stop them.. or you never know luck might be with you.. fingers crossed xxx

Answer 11

this is a scam

Just throw this away