Sorry, You Didn’t Win the African National Lottery After All

November 10, 2007 By Matthew Paulson

When it comes to the possibility of getting something for nothing, a lot of people tend to simply divorce reality. They like the possibility that they could be getting a substantial amount of free money so much that they don’t take the time to consider what the motives of the people who might potentially be giving them money are or even if they will ever actually see any of this money. One of the ways this most commonly shows up is through a variant of the classic Nigerian 419 scam and involves an alleged foreign lottery, and somehow you’re the winner. If you try to collect your ‘lottery winnings’, be prepared to go for a ride.

Here’s how it works. One day you check your email and find an unsolicited message from someone in a foreign country telling you that you (or your email address) have won in a foreign lottery that you’ve never entered. The prize money is usually quite substantial, often several million dollars. The tone of the email will be very up-beat, but often using poor grammar and spelling since the person who wrote it probably does not have English as their native tongue. They will then tell you that you should contact them right away in order to collect your winnings.

If you were to contact them back, they would probably ask for a significant amount of personal information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and most importantly, the account and routing numbers for your checking and savings accounts so that they can ‘transfer’ your ‘lottery winnings’ into your account. This is where the scam comes in. They’ll take your personal information and use that to transfer as much money as they can out of your account under the guise of being a legitimate merchant. After they get the money from your account, you’ll never hear from them again. You will also have a very hard time getting this money back from the bank; you might be able to it in a few rare occasions, but most of the time you’re just out of luck.
There’s another variant of the scam where they’ll send you a cashier’s check and tell you to deposit it and wire them or mail them a fraction of the amount back to pay for some sort of alleged taxes or fees. In this case the cashier’s check is fraudulent, but the bank will tell you that it’s a real check and it will be several months before you find out that the check was invalid. There’s no real security for cashier’s checks in the banking industry, and even some of most authentic looking cashier’s checks could be fraudulent.

There’s an old phrase we all learned when we were young, and that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There are no legitimate foreign lotteries or sweepstakes that you will ever win, especially if you didn’t enter them! If you try to claim your prize money, be prepared to get scammed.

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