Lottery Email Scams & How To Avoid Them

Lottery Email Scams & How To Avoid Them

Think about how much you want to win the lottery. How valuable would tens of millions of Euros be to you? It's the feeling you have now that lottery scam artists look to take advantage of, and every year millions of Euros are fraudulently taken from innocent lottery players.

Everyday we receive emails from our players, asking for advice on scam emails they have received. As Euromillions.com we see it as our responsibility to insure all of our players are informed enough to avoid such scams. The following article will familiarise you with the various ways scam artists try to take advantage of you, and how you can avoid becoming a victim of their tricks.

How Do Lottery Scams Work

There are two end goals to a lottery scam. The first is to engage you in a dialogue whereby the fraudster can convince you to send them money. The second is to use the same dialogue to gain personal information e.g bank account details, your home address, date of birth and phone numbers.

Most commonly the money asked for will be to facilitate a bank transfer, or as some sort of 'handling fee'. Personal details may be used to steal your identity, access your bank accounts, or sold for marketing purposes leading to more unwanted spam.

Scammers have many different tricks to gain your compliance; the most common is to 'spoof' their email address. With this method the scammer can make their email appear differently to the one they used. They will also claim to be from a trusted organisation or position of authority. Most importantly they will tell you that unless you comply with their demands you will not receive winnings.

How To Identify And Avoid An Email Scam

To the unprepared lotto player who is eager to claim a huge prize these emails may be convincing enough. Fortunately with just a few basic understandings you'll find it easy to spot scams, and after reading these guidelines such attempts from fraudsters will be wasted on you.

• Check the email header, or email address in the 'replyto' field. Email addresses can be spoofed. Quite simply this is the process of making 'scamartist@hotmail.com' appear to you as an @euromillions.com address. However the real address can't truly be hidden and will be found in the email header.

• You can't win if you never bought a ticket. There isn't a single lottery in the world that will give it's prize to somebody who didn't buy a ticket. If you don't remember buying a ticket for the prize in question, it's a scam.

• Google their details. If the organisation has no website that can be located on Google, it's a scam.

• Check their English. Most if not all of these fraudulent emails emerge from countries where English isn't so prevalent. As such the written English in these emails is often of poor quality, containing basic spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.

• They ask for money up front. Whether it's for an administration free, processing, taxes etc. no legitimate lottery will ask you for money up front for any reason -your ticket price aside!

• Don't respond. By responding just once your email may be added to a 'sucker list',and you will start to receive many more nuisance emails.

• If it seems to good to be true.....it probably is. Let us never forget this golden rule, because unless you play the lottery you can't win it.

Common sense combined with the above guidelines should help you to easily pick out scam emails and mark them as spam. Click here for some examples of scam emails to give you a more precise idea of what they look like.