Ahmedabad Based Trader Victimized by Lottery E-mail Scam

An Ahmedabad (India) based trader, got an e-mail during May 2011, which stated that, the online lottery form that he had filled has won Rs 50 Lakhs, as reported by The Times of India on May 30, 2011.

The trader was victimized and kept on paying money as processing fee to get that special prize money of lottery. When he ultimately realized that he is being fooled by fraudsters and had already paid Rs 2 Lakhs as processing fee, he then reported the matter to city crime branch's cyber crime cell.

Though he did not file an official complaint, investigators discovered that the e-mails were being generated from within India and the bank accounts were operational in Mumbai.

As per the Police Investigators, this is a new type of online scammers who use the techniques of a common Nigerian fraudster. The e-frauds in these instances are run out of cities, such as Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad. Investigators think that, after properly understanding how the system operates and how to attract the victims, they operate on their own and before the technique becomes public, they immediately scrape up in the moolah and down shutters.

Security experts stated that, unfortunately, instances, such as the above mentioned point to the fact that, lottery e-mail scams launched by scam artists are definitely surging in India.

Security experts and Police Officials in an effort to lessen such attacks state that, the questions netizens must ask themselves to interpret whether it is actually an e-mail lottery scam are as follows.

First and foremost, did the user sign up for the lottery? How did they get user's contact details, if he didn't intentionally sign up for the lottery? Why don't they are aware of user's name? If this is authentic, why would they not contact user through phone, snail mail or schedule a personal meeting? By easily taking 3 minutes of their (user) time to evaluate the answers to these questions, they can immediately find out that it is actually an e-mail lottery scam. Experts stated that, users should not just sit back and do nothing when they get e-mail lottery scams in their inbox; they should report e-mail lottery scams to the authorities so that the crooks responsible for such e-mail scams can be arrested by the Police forces.

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» SPAMfighter News - 6/7/2011