Congratulations! You are the winner of the national lottery in Nigeria! All we need is you to send us your bank routing numbers, social, and a photo ID and we will transfer 4 million dollars into your bank account…promise.
It seems like every single day I get some sort of email letting me know I have won this fabled Nigerian lottery, a lottery I never entered, and a lottery that seems to contacts me at all hours of the day and night from various email addresses most of which yahoo appropriately places directly in my spam filter.
If you are one of the few who have not received your winning notification from the lottery, rest assured it is on its way. The Nigerian lottery must have lost your email address, or not acquired it off of a web site yet…but they will. Your winning notification is on its way.
The people who send out the Nigerian lottery emails wouldn’t keep sending them out, if some people didn’t take them up on it and send along all their personal information.
Once a scammer gets access to your bank account they will withdraw all of the funds out of your account, and then never be heard from again. Rather than winning money in these types of “lotteries” you always lose everything.
Whenever you set anyone up with a free email account such as yahoo or hotmail, you need to also assume that they will receive spam, some of which may be from people who are going to tell them that they have won prizes, and ask for important personal information in order to claim them.
If you give your parents, children, or anyone else a computer be sure that along with house to use the muse and get on the internet you also give them a basic tutorial in scams and what to believe and what not to believe. The Internet can be a scary place. Be prepared.