A typical lottery scam begins with an unexpected email notification 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. Many email lottery scams use the names of legitimate lottery organizations, but this does not mean the legitimate organizations are in any way involved with the scams.
There are several ways to recognise a fake lottery email:
1. Unless you have bought a ticket, you 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 you believe you've won.
2. The scammer will ask you to pay a fee before you can receive your prize. It is illegal for a real lottery to charge any sort of fee. It does not matter what they say this fee is for (courier charges, bank charges, various imaginary certificates — these are all made up by the scammer to get money out of you). All real lotteries subtract any fee and tax from the prize. They never ask you to pay it in advance.
3. Scam lottery emails will nearly always come from free email accounts such as Yahoo!, Hotmail, Live, MSN, Gmail etc, and no real business will use a free email account.
Source: Wikipedia
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