Since I have eliminated most of my e-mail addresses that were receiving lots of spam, I was a bit surprised to see a new scam e-mail show up at one of my e-mail addresses.
I have heard about these lottery scams before and have even received a few of them in the past, but this one was a bit more clever than the others I have seen to date.
This one is coming from someone claiming to be “Darryn Clarke (Mrs),” who for all I know, may be an actual lottery official whose name these scammers have decided to use to add credibility to their scam.
As expected, the e-mail claims that I have won a substantial amount of money in the U.K. Lottery, and then goes on to explain that my e-mail address was selected randomly from various web sites.
That, apparently is their effort to overcome the first objection that would come to mind for most recipients of a message like this. That, of course, would be: “I didn’t enter the U.K. Lottery!”
It then goes on to make the claim that this drawing is part of the country’s effort to raise money for the Olympic Games in 2012.
The problem with that is that organizations that are trying to raise money are not in the habit of giving it away free to random individuals around the world.
A lottery manages to collect the money that is paid out to winners buy selling tickets to those who wish to participate. The key word here is selling. Without money coming in from the sale of lottery tickets, a lottery has no money to distribute to the winners. Pretty simple concept.
Despite their failed attempts to explain away a free lottery, I did find one of their tactics quite clever.
After providing me with my winning number, they provide me with a web site address so I can go there and verify that my number is indeed among the winners.
The site they directed me to appears to be a legitimate lottery web site and sure enough, my number was on the list as a winner! Imagine my excitement! Yeah, right.
I thought this was a rather clever innovation, but like most of these scams, you can see through it pretty easily when you pay attention to detail.
Beside each winning number it indicates where the winning ticket was purchased. For my winning number, it indicated that the ticket was purchased in the “Stoke-on-Trent” area, which I did not bother to look up, but is probably some region or town in the United Kingdom.
The problem is that I have never in my life visited “Stoke-on-Trent,” or any other area of the U.K. Makes it a but difficult to imagine that the unclaimed winning ticket in question is mine.
For the sake of making it easier for people to find this post, I should also mention that the e-mail address they provided to me for contact was info@national-lotto9.2-cool.co.uk, and is likely some domain that the scammers set up to appear as close to possible as a legitimate domain belonging to the U.K. Lottery.
For your amusement, here is the e-mail message as I received it (click image for larger view):
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