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All external links last last verified 07/26/2006

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NOTE: This page Under Construction/Conversion
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Foreign Lottery Scams are also known as Lottery Scams, Lotto Scam, Lottery Letters, Advance Fee Fraud.

SPECIAL NOTE: From the BBB Alert (see below):

Purchasing foreign lotteries are illegal. United States federal law prohibits mailing payments to purchase any ticket, share, or chance in a foreign lottery. Most foreign lottery solicitations sent to addressees in the United States do not come from foreign government agencies or licensees. Instead, they come from fraudulent companies that seek exorbitant fees from those wishing to play. The activities of these companies are neither controlled nor monitored by the government of the country in which they are located.

[My highlight and emphasis -BS]

The "illegality" of it is also noted in the FTC Bulletin, below.

The Scam

You, your company, or your organization won a lottery (usually foreign) that no one remembers entering. Note that the lottery name may be a fake, or it may be a real lottery.

Impressively, most of the emails show the ticket number, "lucky numbers", serial number, amount won, etc. (Damn! That looks real!)

Your winnings have been deposited in a bank in the country in which the lottery was held. (The bank may be real, with a link to the bank's website, but don't believe it.)

In a lot of cases, you are actually a co-winner, meaning the winnings will be shared.

You are supplied with an agent to contact, with address, phone numbers (international, usually).

In some cases, you're provided links to the lottery site and/or the agent. If the lottery and agent are real, the sites are "look-alikes" (probably like the sites you would be sent to in the links in some of the examples, below - they may use the real site's pictures and some of the actual links may be real, but not where you submit your info!). If not, they've been made up and LOOK real.

As in the Nigerian Scam, they want you to send them your information. (This could be simple contact information to start with, or they want access to a bank account into which they will deposit the whole amount of money they have access to.) Sometimes they even say they'd rather this be a new account - making you think this will be safer for yourself. You would then need to send them the bank account information, (including password) for them to deposit the money into it. Remember though, with this information, they now have access to at least your contact information (other than the email address to which the original email was sent), and many banks show all your accounts in one place under the one password. In this case, access to new one gives them access to the others.

I, personally, won more than one Foreign Lottery (I may have had to share... Don't remember and won't until I include them in the site), over a one week period! It was a helluva lot of money. Too bad it wasn't REAL! Then again, it came out of the blue, I've never been to those countries, I know about the Nigerian Scam (and this is closely tied to it... many of these come out of South Africa, too), I've never ENTERED any of them (though that's usually explained in the message), and I'd heard about this from Snopes (Urban Legend Reference Pages).

External Lottery Scam-Specific Links

Examples

Following are links to some of the numerous versions of this scam I have received, or that were sent to me to "check out". I will try to "reproduce" the actual "look" of the email in my examples.

 

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