UK International Lottery
UK International Lottery is the name of a fictitious lottery used to scam unsuspecting people by email. I talked about a Coca Cola scam a few weeks ago, and the UK International Lottery swindle operates in a similar way, but this time it’s the reputation of the UK Lotto that suffers.
When you think about it, the title UK International Lottery is itself nonsense. Either a lottery is restricted to the UK or it’s an international game. As always with this kind of email scam, the creators of the fraud don’t have the basic intelligence to figure that out. Or maybe their theory is that anyone who gets past that title without becoming suspicious is just the type of person they need to read the rest of their message.
I won’t present all of that message here, because it does change from time to time, but the gist of it is that the person receiving the email has won a lottery prize (sometimes referred to as a sweepstakes lottery prize) worth anything from five figures to a cool £1,000,000. This statement is followed by lots of sensible sounding precautions, details about who to contact to process the claim and plenty of fictional registration numbers scattered throughout the message to make it look authentic.
The aim of the UK International Lottery emails is to “phish” for information that can help the scam creator to steal your money. Send any cash to the originator and you can be sure you’ll never see it again. Provide your personal and financial data (bank account number, etc) and you may find that your identity is stolen. Either way, you will lose.
The golden rule to remember is that if you haven’t entered a lottery competition, you can’t win. No genuine lottery enters people at random and then tells them they’ve won a million right out of the blue, so if you get an email telling you that this has happened – be it from the UK International Lottery or anywhere else, interpret it to mean “we want to scam you”.
Article Last Updated: 29/05/2008 11:41:07
