I recieved a mail from YAHOO MAIL LOTTERY, P.O.BOX 1010, LIVERPOOL L170NL, UNITED KINGDOM. IS IT SCAM?

[princeimmanuel]

This is to inform you that you have won prize money of Nine Hundred and Fifty Thousand United States Dollars ($950, 000. 00) for 2012 Prize Promotion which is organized by YAHOO, AOL, WINDOWS LIVE & OTHER SOCIAL NETWORK.

YAHOO and MICROSOFT collects all the email addresses of the people that are active online, among the millions that subscribed to Yahoo and Hotmail and few from other e-mail providers. Six people are selected to benefit from this Promotion and you are one of the Selected Winners.

PAYMENT OF PRIZE AND CLAIMS

Winners shall be paid in accordance with his/her Settlement Center. Yahoo Prize Award must be claimed no later than 14th days, from date of Draw Notification. Any prize not claimed within this period will be forfeited.

Please be informed that you’re CHEQUE (CHECK) of the sum of US$950, 000. 00 (Nine Hundred and Fifty Thousand United States Dollars) is now with your FIDUCIARY AGENT in your allotted Settlement Centre insured and issued with your email address which won you this prize, therefore you should contact your FIDUCIARY AGENT with your detail information so that they will expedite actions for the processing of your fund transfer.

Stated below are your identification numbers:
BATCH NUMBER: MFI/08/APA-43658,
REFERENCE NUMBER: 2008234522
AWARD WINNING NUMBER: 01 14 21 30 35 48

These numbers fall within the South Africa Location file, you are requested to contact your Fiduciary Agent in South Africa and send your winning identification numbers to him;

FIDUCIARY AGENT/CLAIMS MANAGER CONTACT INFORMATION:
TEL: + 27-73-747-7786
FAX: +27-86-659-2003
CONTACT PERSON: MR. SIMON RHOSSOR


You are advised to send the following information to your Fiduciary Agent to facilitate the release of your fund to you. Terms and Conditions applied.

1. Full Name:
2. Country:
3. Contact Address:
4. Telephone Number:

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THEM?

[Kuku Kajoob ♫]

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/ya...se-63.html
Yahoo doesnt give money away
(esp not to people with free email addresses)
and of course, they are not in S. Africa

Nigerian 419 Scam or Advanced Fee scam..to get you to pay money
to get the money sent to you--then they steal your money...and maybe
your ID.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_scam#Lottery_scam

Africa+Money=Scam
or any big money coming to you via email

[agreeablepig950]

100% scam.

There is no lottery.

There is no Yahoo, Skype, 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.

[William]

The first question is:
Did you play in this lottery?
If you answer yes, then, you may have won a lottery!
If you answer no, you didn't buy a lottery ticket in liverpool for the yahoo.lottery then you answered your own question! No it ain't for real.
The only thing for real is your name, and any other information you send then is going to be a real good start on stealing your identity. So if you are totally broke with no credit then send then your info. It can't hurt any. If you have good credit then DON'T sent any of your info to any website you didn't start the relationship with!!!!!

[Prasha]

Please do not reply or take any action on such emails ors sms these all are bogus.

[ksea]

its a scam just mark it a spam.
do not answer it.