Is there any lottery game Yahoo sponsors do?

Question

I just received a letter from Yahoo CEO about a lottery winning.

Is it a fraud? Could anybody from Yahoo Co. tell ?

Answer 1

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. If you have not actually lost money to the scammer, you do not have a case for law enforcement to investigate. They're busy trying to catch the scammers who have stolen from actual victims. Reporting the scammer's 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 2

It is a fraud big time.  Do not reply to it.  Delete it and ignore it.  You will get others pretty soon saying that you have inherited money, won money, have a chance to make a ton of money.  It is scammers wanting you to send them money.  They can also scam you by getting you to cash their bogus checks for them.  They can also scam you by getting you to forward the stuff they bought with stolen credit cards to their country.  They can also steal your identity.  They have lots of ways to hurt you.  The most extreme cases have involved violence and kidnapping.  Delete it and do not bring that kind of misery upon yourself.

Answer 3

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/