Lottery Scams
Thursday January 22, 2009
If you play Powerball online and are known to check out the Powerball results, you may find yourself targeted for lottery scams. Even people with no usual interest in gambling can be targeted by lottery scams, though if your email address is associated with gaming sites, you are likely to be a more obvious target for scammers. Luckily, knowing about Powerball and lottery games can help you to avoid the scammers as there are a few elements to lottery scams that will send up a red flag with most players.
One of the most obvious things that make lottery scam emails stand out is that they are unsolicited. This should make you suspicious from the beginning, as any unsolicited offer of free money should make you wary.
The lottery scam email will be unlikely to mention Australian Powerball systems or anything familiar (if you live in Australia). Scammers tend to claim you have won an international lottery or some such nonsense, something that you do not know the rules of. This is an attempt to make their claim more believable.
Lottery scams will often claim you have been chosen randomly to win a massive prize, sometimes worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This is where anyone who follows the Powerball results or plays any other lottery should easily know the email to be a scam. Any lottery offering a decent prize would not only require people to enter themselves, it would also require that they pay for their entry.
Now, scammers can be tricky in this area, as they may claim you need to pay an administration fee in order for the money to be transferred. If they know what they are doing, they will probably also claim that it is illegal to transfer the money to a foreign player, but they won't tell anyone if you don't. This is meant to convince you that you have broken the law, so that you will not report them after you are ripped off.
Consider how high the Powerball game odds are and how much each entry costs. With many players paying for entries, the size of the prize is manageable for promoters. It is therefore not at all likely that a lottery you did not enter would award you a prize of millions of dollars. Use common sense, DO NOT REPLY TO THE EMAIL, and report the incident to the appropriate authorities.
Please browse our site to read Powerball tips and about Powerball Full System Games, or use our online entry facilities to enter the next game of Powerball. Be sure to come back on Friday to check the latest Powerball results.
