Monday, September 21, 2009

UK National Lottery Winner - Another Scam

One of the guys that I work with received this in an email the other day - UK National Lottery Winner. Quite obviously this is a scam.

UK National Lottery Winner

Where do we start to take this fraud apart?

1. "Dear Winner" - Winner? It's not even personally addressed.
2. "emails/company address" - How exactly do you select a company address when it mentions on the next line that the prize offer is for registered member of Internet E-mail user (whatever that means).
3. "Microsoft computer ballot system" - IBM makes computers, Microsoft writes software.
4. "continents" - Include Canada (?), United state (?), Middle East (?) and Oceania (?) as continents and how does 8x3000 equal 21000?
5. ""e-mail"" - This noun doesn't require quotation marks.
6. "ms -word" - Shouldn't it be spelt as MS Word (quite seriously this couldn't have been written on a computer with MS Word doing the spell checking).
7. "internet" is a proper noun, is it not, and should therefore be spelt as Internet.
8. "." - Missing to complete the sentence. Remember rules of sentences?
9. "bellow" - I don't think you have to yell at your claim agent.
10. "dr_johnbriggs@gala.net" - Sounds more like a "galah" (fool) than gala (special occasion.
11. Details for payment - No bank details required. How on earth are you supposed to give these galahs enough info for them to pay you?
12. "Endeavor" - The British spelling, which is something you would expect from The UK National Lottery, means it should be spelt as "Endeavour".
13. "email" - What happened to the hyphen? Bit of consistency please.
14. "Winners are advised to keep their winning information secret to avoid fraudulent claim" - Say that in proper English.
15. Names followed by titles in different parenthesis and fonts doesn't look very professional.

Be warned - this appears to be a scam leading to identity theft. The information requested, sans bank account details, could quite easily lead to somebody impersonating you for reasons of stealing more than just your bank balance. Steer clear of this rubbish.

5 comments:

James said...

I was sent a leter the other day saying that I was selected to offload $136m from a Nigerian bank. All I had to do was to provide all my bank account details, home phone and address. As it all looked legit, and they sounded as if they really needed my help, I provided everything they wanted.......NOT!!

Anonymous said...

Dirty Bastards.

Susan Ham said...

I have just deleted TWO of these suckers!

Hammy said...

James - Glad to see that you didn't get done.

Ma - I don't seem to get these as I don't open junk emails.

Susan Ham said...

Wasn't in me junk file!