What Are Lottery & Winner Award Compensation Scams?

[Roxy]

In principle, lottery, winner, and award compensation scams operate on the onus that you are the winner (or to be the recipient) of a large sum of money or an expensive piece of merchandise from some form of lottery, lucky draw, award or promotional give away. But in all cases these are fake offers and the person contacting you is only trying to scam you and you haven’t won anything.

The scams usually involve offering you free money, cars, or cell phones and the scammers will say that the offer is related to a grant, an award, a charity, a donation, a lucky draw, a promotion, Covid-19 aid money, or an actual lottery. The scammers will also usually claim they are from a car manufacturer (like BMW, Audi, Mercedes etc), a technology company (like Google, FaceBook, etc), an electronic company (like Samsung, Apple, etc), or a government entity, a non-profit organization or even a charity foundation.

Other lottery related email scams pretend to be from an individual who claims to have won a lottery already and wants to give you a share of their winnings, or from a wealthy businessman, a wealthy public figure, or a philanthropist who claims you have won a give away to some of their money as charity.

Some lottery scam emails are less straight forward and may present themselves as a mix of things such as you being the winner of some sort of compensation that involves humanitarian organizations like The United Nations, The WHO, The IMF, The World Bank, etc.

Many of the the lottery related "winner" scam emails may also not clearly state why you are being compensated, but simply say that you have won something and it may not be clear where the winnings are coming from. Sometimes the scams may place 2 or 3 company names into the lottery scam to make things even more confusing.

During the course of the scam the scammer may also provide a so-called online banking website (with login details) in an attempt to prove that the funds truly exist and are safely sitting in a bank account awaiting payout. In all cases these bank websites are always fraudulent/fake websites owned and controlled by the scammer and the money that they are showing within the bank account are fictitious funds in a non-existent bank account. The scammer may also ask you to contact 2-3 different people that the scammer claims are also involved with the transaction as a psychological technique designed to make the transaction seem more legitimate. In most cases though you are dealing with only one scammer who is acting behind all of the various different personas being presented.

The scammer will eventually ask you to send some money before any of the money being promised can be sent out to you. This is a type of scam known as Advance-Fee Fraud. Advance-Fee Fraud is best described as an offer of money, merchandise, services, employment, or even romance, but where the victim is asked to pay a fee in advance to obtain whatever is being promised to them by the scammer. The main scam strategy of all advance-fee fraud scams is to try to persuade the victim to send money, and then continue to send more money to the scammer, as many times as possible, until the victim eventually runs out of money and/or goes into debt as a result of losses from the scam. And in the end, the victim only loses their money and never receives any of the money at all being promised by the scammer.

Please click here to read more about the psychological techniques used to deceive people with Advance-Fee Fraud scams. The following article on Wikipedia also explains more about Advance-Fee Scams in general: Wikipedia Link