Lottery Scams

How can you win a lottery when you can’t remember buying the lottery ticket?

This is yet another scam you probably find regularly in your email inbox. It seems that you’ve won some sort of lottery, often in another country, that you’ve never heard of. Well isn’t that just fantastic! All you need to do is give them a little information and they’ll deposit the money in your bank account. Sounds good doesn’t it?

How you lose the lottery

You are given an agent to contact that send you a form. They want much od the usual information: a copy of your driver’s license and your passport if you have one and perhaps your social security number. They just want to verify that you are who you say you are. What’s really happened is that’ve sent someone everything they need to steal your identity and you have done all the work.

It gets even better

So lets say that you mailed in the form and you are contacted by your agent again to begin the transfer of payment. You’ll be told that the money needs to be put directly into your bank account which is probably where you’ll want it anyway. This is where you find out that there are some fees you need to pay up front before the transfer can occur. The reasons given will be taxes, legal fees or insurance.It will all sound perfectly reasonable but this should raise more than a few flags. So far, you’ve received nothing.

Think about it for a minute. You were contacted, out of the blue, and told you won something you’ve never heard of in some other country and now you have to send them money. Another variation has you set up a bank account to speed up the transfer but the minimum deposit is several thousand dollars. You won $400,000 US so why not? You may even be asked to travel to Europe where you will be asked to pay the fee then pick up your money.

Most people won’t have made it this far because in real life things like this just don’t happen. People do not contact you out of the blue to give you money and if you do you should not only think twice but three or four times before you send them anything. Sure, it could happen but our advice is that you think about it and do a little research on the people and banking institutions involved at the very least before proceeding. Always know who you are dealing with when it comes to your money.