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Things I Did, Below

I, personally, receive email in HTML format. The following was received (and looked) like I received it.

• I removed my email addresses. These came to various accounts and some no longer exist. There are places on this site you can get hold of me if you wish or need to. They are protected from spambots using JavaScript, but all you have to do is click on them.
• All scammer and related email addresses, and any actual website links have been changed, at least putting spaces into them. They appear as underlined blue links, though they aren't.
• Any notes I added in the actual letter are in square brackets ("[" "]"), are bold, red in color, and highlighted. If what I found "behind the links" (email or website) are different than what was displayed, I will include them in this type of note.
• All spelling, spacing, line-wrapping, and punctuation errors are the ones that appeared in the original received email. (I may or may not analyze some or all of these.)

Scam Example
Received 06/08/2006

Email Headers

[DO NOT send email to any of the following email addresses]

Notes

This one isn't near as "sophisticated-looking" as the others... Note the general "sloppiness" (Why aren't all liines the same length? - Because SOME note and email and maybe html authoring programs will "break" the lines (put a carriage -return/line-feedor - in HTML - a <br> at the end of each line to keep it on the screen. If the window of the latter paragraphs was displayed on the screen smaller than the rest of it, and they cut-and-pasted from it, the line-breaks come, too. Then if they don't delete them, this is the type of email with which you end up.) My point is that an actual business letter, email or not, would NOT look like this... Each line of the body of the email would be either approximately or exactly (depending on Justification being set or not) the same.

I'm not going to enumerate what makes this email ... "sloppy", as I have in others. I'm sure you can see them, yourself. I AM going to point out some things you should watch for in emails like this that YOU may get:

Problems I see:

• Besides the line-break problem, the first thing I noticed is that all of the email addresses are Russian, except the "Fiduciary Agent's", which is a UK address. Why would "Her Royal Highness,the Queen of England" be sponsoring a lottery in Russia?
• Note that the "To:" email address is NOT MINE. It's the same as the "From:" address. This occurs with me when I send an email to a mailing list... Because of my email client's requirement to have SOMETHING in the "To:", I send it to myself, and I put the mailing list in the "BCC:" (Blind Carbon Copy). Depending on how the list is processed, this COULD have been my email address, but if I won, why would it have been sent to a mailing list? And if it wasn't a list, why would they have NOT put MY email address in the "To:" and THEIR email address in the "BCC:"?
• If I didn't enter (in any way), then the only way they would have gotten this email address is to
   
  1. TROLL for it (the word I use for Spammers and others who use "spam-bots" and their like to ... "troll" the web for email addresses);
  2. One of the VERY FEW businesses or FRIENDS that have this as one of my email addresses must have SOLD it to them (according to their privacy policies, they would never/shouldn't have done so);
  3. They bought a mailing list from a TROLLER, SPAMMER or HACKER or someone else who gathers email addresses, and put... everyone(?) on it?

  Why would a trust someone who attaches emails from the world, received in such a fashion to a lottery ticket?
   

• I didn't see that many blatent English language errors in this one, as I do in so many other scam emails, but (again, relating to sloppiness), the many word and line-spacing problems. (And again, in a business letter related to hundreds of thousands of dollars, AND supposedly from the UK, who pride themselves on their command of the English language, why so many of this type of error?)
• As I noted above, all email addresses in the header have the same domain and are from RUSSIA. Why, then, is the email address of the person I am supposed to contact (in the email) to netlottery_netdept @ yahoo.co.uk? I mean, I understand the UK part (based on the email), but why YAHOO and not a business? Could it be because Yahoo is one of the many free email purveyors, and this is a "throw-away" account?

As you can see, a little analysis (and healthy skepticism) about the "something for nothing" (not even having to APPLY! WOW!) offered, can save me from:

1. actually getting on someone's mailing list (least troublesome);
2. beginning a process that will take weeks and cost me thousands of dollars - well, all they can get out my accounts;

just to end up with nothing.

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