Have i won £250.000? i got an email from sweepstake lottery?

Question

today i got an email from sweepstake lottery saying ive won a quarter of a million pound but i dont know if this is genuine, my mums on about booking holiday tickets tomorrow to florida for 2 week, what do you reckon?

Answer 1

Scam Scam Scam Scam delete it and forget it.

Answer 2

It's a hoax. Any legitimate lottery will send a registered letter that you have to sign for. Forget the extra vacation.

You can do some lookup on www.snopes.com for some of the more common scams. Most of them will ask for some kind of a fee up front so they can send your "winnings", then disappear with the fee you have less than you started with.

Answer 3

I've won one everyday for the past month trust me it's fake.  If you read the emails you can usually pick up the fake dialect.  Do NOT give them your name and address because this is part of the identity theft.   Most of the great britian sweepstakes I am getting are from americas judging be the return email addresses.  Look in the British phone book for a number if you want to verify.  Most of the emails tell you not to let anyone know.  Gee I wonder why!  They are scams and the FBI could probably arrest these people.

Answer 4

The phone line to claim is £10 per minute

but dont worry you will have plenty of money 2 pay

Answer 5

U DIDNT ENTER SO HOW COULD YOU WIN WHEN  ARE PEOPLE GOING TO REALISE ITS A SCAM FFS

Answer 6

Sadley, normily if things are too good to be treu, then they probebly are....

if you never entered this compition, then it is whats called a 'spam e-mail'

DONT REPLY spam it imedeantly..

so , in short, although it would be very nice, it is a scam..

probebly have to pay something like £100 diposit and all it will be is a book of money off voushers for ludecruss things like £5,000 watches! sorry.

Answer 7

i reckon you have, can you borrow me $5,000 plz.

Answer 8

In your dreams

Answer 9

hello friend , please don't trust that e-mail.  in that case, i win lotteries everyday.  those emails are just fake. ok, if you don't believe me, see what happens if you trust them lot.

Answer 10

This is a SCAM. Check out the below link for confirmation of various email scams hitting the internet, including the famous Yahoo/MSN lottery scams and how to report them :

http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/lo...

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/or...

Unscrupulous thieves have sent you this email and they are trying to part you from your hard earned cash. They will often ask you to call a premium rate number and keep you holding on whilst you rack up a huge phone bill. They are then paid a large proportion of this phone bill. They may ask you to divulge personal information about yourself or ask for your bank or credit card details. Do not divulge any such information under any circumstances. It is surprising how many innocent victims have been duped by these types of emails. Just remember the thieves who send them are very clever and extremely convincing. I suggest you delete the email and send it into cyberspace, hopefully along with the thieving scumbags who send them.

Check out these sites for further information :

http://www.scambusters.com

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/

Answer 11

NO, come on don't be so naive.

Answer 12

It's a scam. Delete and forget it.

Answer 13

did u participate 4 this lotterry?? if u didn't then its fake trust me

Answer 14

BE VERY CAREFUL, AS THERE ARE ALOT OF SHARKS ON THE NET, DON'T BE REELED IN

Answer 15

It's rubbish probably, even if you entered the lottery. Any reputable firm would not contact you like that for £250K.

Answer 16

it will be a scam saying she will have to pay admin fees to release payment etc it wil be a scam with the promise of a big win most people would be silly enough to give details or money to recieve this so called prize lol

Answer 17

It's a con. Your will be asked to send money to enable the company to release the funds to you.

Don't you know if you entered a sweepstake lottery???

Answer 18

sounds like a scam to me. have you ever heard of 'sweepstake lottery'?

Answer 19

I'm sorry to tell you that the e-mail you received is a scam. The message sounds too good to be true because it is. There is no such thing as the Yahoo! Lottery. The same goes for MSN, Toyota, AOL, Coca-Cola, et cetera. None of these companies are giving away money to random Internet users.

Rather, scammers are collecting e-mail addresses from all over the Internet and bombarding them with these fake e-mails. If you reply to this scam e-mail, the con artist will soon ask you for money. There are many excuses for why the scammer wants money, but they're all lies.

Many scammers will tell you that you need to wire them money to cover "courier fees." When you do this, the scammer will come back soon to ask for more money. This will continue until you are either broke or wise to the scam. Either way, you have lost your money - and there will not be a lottery prize to collect at the end of this mess, either.

Some scammers will even go so far as to provide you with documents as "proof" that they are trustworthy. You might receive a scanned copy of a passport as identification. This is either fake or stolen. Seeing an ID proves nothing. And anybody with MS Paint and five minutes of free time can forge confirmation papers, lists of winners, or other such documents to convince victims that the lottery winnings are real. The scammers will try to make their cons look as genuine as possible so as to extract your money from you.

You can confirm that you've received a scam e-mail by doing one or more of these things:

* Open the company's official Web site in a fresh browser window. Yahoo!, MSN, et cetera will not have any information on their Web sites about their lottery drawings or giveaways. This is because these companies are not really giving away money. At the most, you might find a fraud warning on these official Web sites. This is an excellent indication that you're being scammed, as companies that *are* giving away money will promote this fact all over the place.

* Copy part of the e-mail and paste that into a search engine. Many known scam e-mails are collected and published at various anti-scam Web sites. These pages are there to help spread the word about these scams so that fewer people will fall for them. Use these free tools to your advantage: search parts of any suspicious e-mail you receive before you reply.

* Contact your local law-enforcement department. More often than not, somebody there is familiar enough with this widespread scam to confirm that it is not real.

You should delete the scam e-mail and forget about it. Reporting the e-mail account to the provider to have the box closed might seem like a good idea, but this can ruin an active law-enforcement investigation.

You can also warn people you know about these scams. The more people we all tell, the fewer potential victims these low-life scammers will have.

http://www.scamwarners.com is an excellent Web site for more information about fake lottery scams and other, similar cons.

Answer 20

sorry but tbh, i really doubt it. did u enter any kind of competition with the lottery?

what details do you have to give? i wouldn't give any yet if i were you..

Answer 21

Sounds like a scam to m e .  Did you enter the competition?