Email Fraud - Protecting the Vulnerable

Hi folks,
Today, I was inducted into the nasty world of email fraud. It made me angry enough to take action and I thought some helpful information might be appropriate with this warning. Here you will see a portion of the email that I received. Rather than simply deleting it, I felt it was important enough to do several things.

U.K NATIONAL LOTTERY
Dear {Winner}

Congratulations from all the staffs here at the UK National Lottery Headquarters.

This is the UK National Online Lottery Sweepstakes, an online lottery sweeps open to all individual from all over the world. We got your Email contact from our professional data base randomly picked from your website by our computer random selection draws. Your email address was luckily picked by our computer after series of search. So you have been approved to claim the said amount specified on the winning notification mail sent to you.
In order to verify your winnings, we need your particulars for record purposes.

Attached here is a copy of our verification form, please fill accordingly so as to proceed with your winnings. We do have some of the below data with us but for proper verification of winnings we will really appreciate if you will fill out the correct data’s and return to us, if the information given to us match with the information we have, this means you are our actual winner and have received our winning notification mail. This is done so as to avoid impersonation.

So do fill out the verification form and send back to us as soon as possible. Note that you have 2weeks after the receipt of this mail to claim your prize. So act fast and get back to us so we can proceed on the deeming process and transfer your prize to you in the shortest possible time.

Once again congratulations from all the staff.

Upon the receipt of the duly requested data, send a copy to the Acorn Couriers Limited With reference to Mr. Twyford Philips. Email :mailto: acorndispatchltd1@yahoo.co.uk

If you ever get email from an unknown source offering absurd amounts of money, sit still and in a few days, a second email will follow with "instructions" on claiming your prize. They always include a politely worded demand for an amount of money from you up front. At that moment, stop. It is a scam. Here are a couple of
tips on things we can all do upon receiving an email of this kind. If the email address is from Yahoo; send a report to either spoof@yahoo.com or phishing@cc.yahoo-inc.com. Ask them to conduct an investigation. The least that can happen is that they will shut the address down. If we all report enough enough, it will slow down their attempts and perhaps our email providers will provide better protection. Obviously, you should have antivirus, spyware, spam and phishing protection (although I have all of them and this one got through)! Next, fire off an email to all of your contacts and ask that they do the same. You'd be surprised at the way those numbers can multiply thus limiting victims by the thousands.
The biggest clue & the dumbest thing they did was to use the actual logo for the UK National Lottery - national being the key word - not International.
Of interest is the fact that I clicked on the logo and got the real UK Lottery &, sure enough, they have warnings posted about fraudulent emails but tell you not to bother letting them know about it which I believe is irresponsible - but what do I know?
So, that's my rant. I hope it helps. If you have a story that could help others, please let me know.
Marg5522