How to tell if you have received a lottery scam e-mail

It’s very easy to tell if you have received a lottery email. These emails claim that your email was randomly chosen to win a zillion dollars or Euros. There aren’t any lotteries based on randomly selecting email addresses. No lottery in the world does that. No email hosting company would give out their customer’s addresses, even to a legitimate lottery company. If they did, they would be in violation of privacy policy laws. So, right off the bat, if the email subject line mentions that you have won a ton of money in a lottery, it’s a scam spam.

Writing Style Warning Signs:

If you weren’t sure whether there was such a thing as a national or international lottery done by email, you can still find many other clues that you have a lottery scam spam. They are usually written with almost no regard for English spelling, grammar or punctuation. THEY WILL EVEN USE ALL CAPITALS LIKE THIS. Only idiots and scammers write entire emails in capital letters.

Biggest Warning Sign Of All:

The biggest warning sign is that there will be a link in the email for you to click on and confirm that you have read the email and are eagerly awaiting your winnings for the nonexistent lottery.

Here the scam works in different ways. One way is to bring you to a site that might mirror your state or a country’s national lottery. The copycat site will then ask for some information so they know where to send the money to.

This information would include your bank account or credit card number. Once they have that, you no longer will have any money in your bank account and your credit card statement will go through the roof.

Another way that the lottery scam works is that you are sent to a site that does not ask for these personal questions, but does ask for your name and address, in order to send you a check. While you are on that site, a door is open for malware (malicious software) to enter into your computer. This gives the sender of the malware access to your files, your personal data or exactly what you see on your computer screen. They could even use your computer just to gain access to your email address book so they can find more places to send the scam spam to.

What To Do:

If you get a lottery email scam, delete it without clicking on any links that may be included in the email. Afterwards, immediately delete the “delete” file in your email program. Some malware has been known to activate even though you haven’t clicked on any links in the email. Just getting it at all can infect you if you keep the email long enough.

You can also avoid spam lottery fraud with the use of a spam filer for your email program and the latest version of a computer security package, which includes a firewall, an anti-virus program and an anti-spyware program.