I received an interesting email today sent to my Gmail account. The subject line was: CONFIRM RECIEPT CALL +447031945834; the email address was: MICROSOFT LOTTERY BOARD <info@msn.com>; and the content of the email was:

Congratulation your email address have won the sum of £250,000.
Pounds in the ( MICROSOFT PROMOTION).you are hereby advised to get
back to us, to claim your prize with your complete details,Name,sex,
age,Address,country,occupation

Contact Mr Prinnket Graffin
Email:info_microsoft999@yahoo.com.hk

Mrs Rose Wood.
...............................
I mean, I'd like to win £250,000 and all, but I'm sure that's not what this is about. Have any of you seen it before? Do you know what their angle is?

I tried to search it five ways on Snopes, and nothing. But it can't be real.

Wordmatic

They will ask for your bank account number so they can transfer the money.

To me it seems so obvious that you can't win a lottery that you've not entered that I am surprised that anyone gets caught by these kinds of scam.

Do not reply! It's definitely a scam. I get that type of thing all the time. Usually the subject line is enough to tell me delete it. Opening those may expose you to viruses and spyware and worse. Definitely don't download anything from those emails.

I Googled "MICROSOFT LOTTERY BOARD" and got 3,920 hits. Here's one of them. And this site lists hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lottery scams:

quote:

FREE LOTTERIES - NOTE: There is NO such thing as a "free" lottery. All lotteries must charge in order to have money to give away. And NO major corporation, least of all, Microsoft, is going to give away money to lotteries, email address holders or as a "promotion" . They exist to make money, not give it away. If you see the word "free" in the name, you can be certain that it is a scam.

If I were you I'd also run a full up to date virus check. As was said above, just opening these emails can infect your computer.

Ah, just opening the email? I didn't click anything, and I opened it because the subject line seemed as though it could have been something legitimate. I will report it to Gmail and run a virus scan then. Thanks for that tip, Bob.

Richard, as soon as I read the email, of course I knew it was a scam.

It obviously was written by a not-so-literate person.