YAHOO! BETA /MICROSOFT INTERNATIONAL AWARD 2012 GOVERNMENT ACCREDITED LICENSE!!! is this real?

[Richard]

i am asking if this group is authentic? because they sent me an email saying that i won in a 2012 YAHOO! MICROSOFT / STAATSLOTERIJ wheel E-game
which was conducted at our international corporate office complex in
London, England. and it quote...

YAHOO! BETA /MICROSOFT INTERNATIONAL AWARD 2012
GOVERNMENT ACCREDITED LICENSE!!!
YAHOO! BETA /MICROSOFT IS REGISTERED UNDER THE DATA
PROTECTION ACT OF; (Registration Z720633X).

Ref No: YBM-EBS-719AF
Batch Number: YBM-EBS-390AF
Winning Number. YBM-EBS-798AF
Coupon No.MSTL-146478972197

Dear Email Bearer,

CONSOLATION PRIZE WINNING NOTICE!!!

Yahoo! Beta private International E-games organizers and Co-sponsors,
MICROSOFT/ STAATSLOTERIJ officially bring to your notice of the final
draw result of 2012 YAHOO! MICROSOFT / STAATSLOTERIJ wheel E-game
which was conducted at our international corporate office complex in
London, England.

Most recently this foundation set up the YAHOO! BETA LOTTERY SCHEME to
give out prizes based on COMPUTER BALLOT SYSTEM. By doing this the
foundation seek to encourage the use of Internet for academic and
business pursuits. Its major aim is to promote music, theater, art and
literature projects in the social and political arena with a focus on
health, as well as science, research, and higher education. We wish to
Congratulate and inform you on the selection of your email coupon
number which was selected among the 5 lucky consolation prize winners.

Your email ID identified with Coupon No. MSTL-146478972197 was
selected by our E-games Random Selection System (ERSS) with entries
from the 50,000 different email addresses enrolled for the E-game.
Your email ID was included among the 50,000 different email addresses
submitted by our partner international email provider companies.

YAHOO! & MICROSOFT WINDOWS and OTHERS NETWORK, arrange and gather
some of all the e-mail addresses of the people that are active
online, among the Millions that subscribed to Yahoo! and Hotmail,
and others NETWORKS we only select FIVE (5) candidates annually as
our winners through Electronic Balloting System (EBS) without the
candidate applying, we congratulate you for being one of the people
selected You have won a consolation cash prize of $ _____.The YAHOO! BETA, MICROSOFT/STAATSLOTERIJ Group
have approved a payout of your consolation cash prize which will be
remunerated directly to you by the official Payment Agency Board.


CLAIM AND PAYMENT OF PRIZE.

Yahoo! Beta Lottery Prize must be claimed not later than 12 days from
date of Draw Notification after the Draw date in which Prize has won.


Our DUE PROCESS UNIT (DPU) will render to you complete assistance and
provide additional information and processes for the claims of your
consolation prize. For due processing of your winning claim, please
contact your claims Agent Rev Silva Clinton who has been assigned to
assist you.

CONTACT YOUR CLAIMS AGENT:

Name: Rev Clinton Maurice
E-mail: clinton_maurice71@yahoo.com

You are advised to provide him with the following information:

Full Name: ............................................

Contact Address: ...................................

Phone Number: ....................................

Fax Number: ........................................

Nationality: ...........................................

Occupation............................................

Marital Status: .....................................

Sex: .....................................................

Age: .....................................................

Amount Won: ......................................

Country of origin..................................

i want to know if it is real or a fraud or scam? thank you

[Kittysue]

100% SCAM
Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft ever hold a lottery or give away money

Here is Yahoo's warning about this scam http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/ya...se-63.html
Here is Microsoft's warning about this scam http://www.microsoft.com/security/resour...hatis.aspx

Mark as Spam and Delele

[Hersh]

There is no such prize.
Microsoft does not use email addresses of its rival Yahoo to do business.
The data they request is possibly a little bit short of what they need to start stealing from you, but it can enable them to craft "personal" looking spam to scam you into answering a few more questions.

[Jollyqueen809]

100% scam.

There is no lottery.

There is no Yahoo, Facebook, Nokia, Shell, BBC, Google, Coca-Cola, MSN, Microsoft, BMW or any other company in the entire world that sponsors a lottery that notifies winners via email, phone call or text.

There is only a scammer trying to steal your hard-earned money.

The next email will be from another of the scammer's fake names and free email addresses pretending to be the "lottery official" and will demand you pay for made-up fees and taxes, in cash, and only by Western Union or moneygram.

Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever.

Now that you have responded to a scammer, you are on his 'potential sucker' list, he will try again to separate you from your cash. He will send you more emails from his other free email addresses using another of his fake names with all kinds of stories of great jobs, lottery winnings, millions in the bank and desperate, lonely, sexy singles. He will sell your email address to all his scamming buddies who will also send you dozens of fake emails all with the exact same goal, you sending them your cash via Western Union or moneygram.

You could post up the email address and the emails themselves that the scammer is using, it will help make your post more googlable for other suspicious potential victims to find when looking for information.

Do you know how to check the header of a received email? If not, you could google for information. Being able to read the header to determine the geographic location an email originated from will help you weed out the most obvious scams and scammers. Then delete and block that scammer. Don't bother to tell him that you know he is a scammer, it isn't worth your effort. He has one job in life, convincing victims to send him their hard-earned cash.

Whenever suspicious or just plain curious, google everything, website addresses, names used, companies mentioned, phone numbers given, all email addresses, even partial sentences from the emails as you might be unpleasantly surprised at what you find already posted online. You can also post/ask here and every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find before taking a chance and losing money to a scammer.

If you google "fake yahoo lottery", "lotto Western Union fraud" or something similar, you will find hundreds of posts of victims and near-victims of this type of scam.