New Lottery E-mail Scam Abusing Microsoft

A fake lottery e-mail is hitting the inboxes of netizens in Great Britain. The e-mail claims to be originating from 'The Microsoft Lottery Incorporation'.

The fraudulent e-mail asserts recipient the winner of a prize money of £750,000.00 for 2010 Annual Lottery Promotion organized by MSN/Yahoo Lottery in collaboration with the Microsoft Windows.

Further, the e-mail states that the lottery organizers make use of electronic balloting system even without the winner applying for the scheme and choose just five people a year as winners.

Then, the recipient is asked to give requisite details, like full name, sex, residential address, age, occupation, telephone number, state and country, in order to claim the prize money.

The recipient of the lottery e-mail is asked to make a statement that if he provides incorrect information, his rights to prize money will be forfeited. The e-mail then ends in a very professional manner.

Microsoft informs the users that if by any chance they have furnished the required details, they have straightway lost their money to scammers.

In such a case, the victim should inform the local law enforcement agency about the case and ask for a copy of the police report. If a victim wants to help fight the challenge of Internet lottery scam, he should share a copy of his police report with Microsoft by sending it to lotfraud@microsoft.com.

Meanwhile, to stop the lottery scam, Microsoft has formed a coalition with firms worldwide to assemble and evaluate data on lottery fraud victims. Microsoft announced that it will share this intelligence with global law enforcement agencies so that criminals who commit such fraud may be punished.

Security experts state that lottery fraud is one of most rapidly increasing and destructive online crime at present. Lottery fraud is already costing million dollars every year to the worldwide netizens.

Finally, Microsoft suggested users to stay away from such money enticing messages as they are completely fabricated.

Related article: New Zealand Releases Code To Reduce Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 3/2/2010