In the mid 90’s I received several letters in the mail, that were too good to be true: I had won extraordinary amounts of money, at lotteries originating in the UK, Malta or the Dutch Antilles.
I wasn’t sure how to respond and thus I didn’t.
The lottery scam was new back then, but these days I get “rich” several times a week via email.
The scammers are from Nigeria, the Middle East, India and China – all over the world pretty much.
They send those email notifications about how you supposedly won or inherited large amounts of money. All it takes is a handful of people that aren’t familiar with the scam; these fraudsters continue to make money using 20 year old methods.
When someone responds to their email, they attempt to convince them to provide an amount of cash to secure exclusivity or access to the alleged funds, that are supposedly in the millions of dollars.
By committing money to get the promised funds, one gets stuck in an endless game of bloodsucking. Fortunes have been lost this way.
Some daring recipients of those emails play with the senders, reversing their game; some fun examples can be found at 419Eater.com.
Unless you actually play the lottery, you won’t be winning any money – definitely not from some country half way around the world; when someone posing as Gaddafi’s widow promises you $50 million in hidden funds in exchange for your bank account details, delete that email without any second thought.
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