Is there a South African Lottery Award Program?

Question

Is there a South African Lottery Award Program?

Answer 1

Sorry friend but there is no Microsoft, Yahoo or other e-mail lottery, it's a scam do not answer do not give personal information.The following sites give more information

http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/nigeri...

http://www.thescambaiter.com/forum/showt...

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

.Also If you go to the following site you will get some info on ID theft www.identity-theft.org.uk the iinternet is safe enough if you are careful but please answer nothing that you are doubtful about.Good Luck and be careful

Answer 2

Did you also get one of those emails.

It's a phishing scam

Answer 3

This is a SCAM. The below links confirm many 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 4

I'm sorry, but the e-mail that you received is a scam. The message sounds too good to be true because it is. Legitimate lotteries (the UK lottery, for example) do not contact random people to tell them that they've won.

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.

Think about these things:

* How can you win a lottery that you never entered? You cannot. If you do not buy a ticket, you cannot win.

* How did the real lottery commission get your e-mail address? They couldn't have, because you never gave it to them. Even if you do go buy a ticket, you don't supply your e-mail address.

* Why wouldn't you be notified of your lottery prize by certified mail? This is, of course, assuming that you entered the lottery in the first place, and that you gave contact details that are attached to your ticket. If you really win a prize drawing, then you'll be notified by a more secure means than e-mail.

If you still aren't sure that this is a scam, do the following:

* 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.