You have not won any lottery – Email lottery scam

There are several threats on the Internet that one needs to actively avoid. The Internet can be compared to a national highway. While this “highway of information” can take you places, providing you all that you need, on the way, one must also be wary of the dangers that one might face on the way. One of the dangers we are going to discuss in this post is  “lottery scams”.

If you are an active Internet user, and use an active email ID, you might already be aware of what I am talking about. An email lottery scam can be broadly described as a malicious mail which informs you that you have won a huge amount of money in a lottery and asks you to deposit a certain percentage of that amount into a remote account, as processing fee. Once you have done this, the sender may ask you to deposit simultaneous fees amounts in different accounts. Post this, you would never hear from the senders. On a lot of occasions, it becomes difficult to trace the offenders, considering that the money is asked to be deposited in an overseas account and scamsters are from abroad.

A case in point would be mumbai internet lottery scam. The recent case in our very own Mumbai is enough to set alarm bells ringing, but you, as a reader of this article can be easily safe by practicing a small series of steps. In this case, the victim, received a mail informing her that she had won a lottery to the tune of millions and asked to deposit “processing fees” repeatedly. Once she did this, the scamster decamped with the money, but were thankfully caught, thanks to the alertness of the police. Here the scamsters were from the same city, which helped solve matters. What if they belonged to some remote location and moved base before the police reached them?
That is where our series of simple steps would come into use. They are broadly given below:

• NEVER treat a mail which claims that you have won a lottery, some large amount of money, with importance. Do NOT open it, considering it might have a worm or a virus which might try to hack into your computer system and steal all your precious data. The same rule applies if someone is claiming to give you a lot of “free downloads” without any fees or verification.
• You can NEVER win a lottery if you haven’t taken part in one. Most mails that come across to you would often claim that you won the lottery through a RANDOM draw of IP addresses or something on these lines. Such claims are NEVER true.The mail which is making you so happy, might also be putting a similar false smile across thousands of other faces worldwide.
• NEVER give out your account number to unidentified senders on the internet. Your bank wouldNEVER ask you for your pin verification OR your account number online through your personal email,because they were the ones who gave it to you in the first place, remember? Someone claimingthat they need your account number to transfer huge amounts of money from someplace to theother is not telling you the truth because such a person DOES NOT have that sum of money. Instead,he or she might have a good mind to empty your account in case you are sweet enough to share youryour account!

I shall share examples of what these emails look like in another of my post. In the meanwhile, the pointers above shall be more than sufficient to keep you safe from most email scam threatsonline. With a little alertness and care, the internet can be a great place to hang out or be used as a treasure trove of knowledge. The ground rule is NEVER TRUST. Don’t lose your sleep over this, just be a little careful.