Microsoft lottery

Skepticism General Skepticism
1

I dunno about you okes, but I’m just a teensy weensy hair of a soupcon sceptical about this:

MICROSOFT INTERNET LOTTERY

CONGRATULATIONS!

YOU WON $800,000.00!

MICROSOFT Corporation, gives members random cash prizes. Today, your e-mail account is randomly selected as one of the 5 top winners’ accounts who will get cash prizes from us. We are happy to inform you that you have won a
prize money of (Eight Hundred Thousand US Dollars) $800,000.00) for the month of September Lottery win promotion which is organized by Microsoft Corporation Worldwide every month.

MICROSOFT Corporation ! collects all the e-mail ID of the people that are online, among the millions that subscribe to the world e-mail we only select five people every month as our winners through electronic
balloting System without the winner applying, we are congratulating you for being one of the people selected. All participant were selected through a computer balloting system drawn from Nine hundred thousand E-mail addresses from Canada, Australia, United States, Asia, Europe, Middle East, Africa and
Oceania as part of our international promotions program which is conducted annually.

This Lottery was promoted and sponsored by a conglomerate of some multinational companies as part of their social responsibility to the citizens in the communities where they have operational base.

Furthermore your details(e-mail address) falls within our Spanish representative office in GHANA, as indicated in your play coupon and our prize of $800,000.00 USD will be released to you from this regional branch
office in GHANA,

HOW TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE

These are your identification numbers…

Batch number…Lwh 09445
Lotto number…Lwh09446
Winning number…Lwh09447
Serial number…Lwh009482

To begin your claims, kindly contact the Fiduciary Agent Dr. Ralph Winter of Microsoft Corporation Worldwide- LOTTERY BOARD GHANA on email
address:

[email protected]
Tel: +233-246614813

You are required to forward to him, the following details:

1.FULL NAME
2.COUNTRY OF ORIGIN .
3.PRESENT ADDRESS
4.SEX
5.DATE OF BIRTH
6.AGE
7.OCCUPATION
8.TELEPHONE NUMBERS/CELL
9.FAX NUMBER(IF ANY)
10.MARITAL STATUS
11.WINNING NUMBER, BATCH NUMBER AND LOTTO NUMBER.
12 THE MONTH YOU WON
13 AMOUNT WON

As soon as you contact your agent, he will advise you on what to do in order to get your prize money.Congratulations once more!!

For security reasons, we advice all winners to keep this information confidential from the public until your claim is processed and your prize released to you. This is part of our security protocol to avoid double
claiming and unwarranted abuse of this programme by non-participant or unofficial personnel.

Yours Sincerely,

Dr. BARRY KNIGHT (PHD)
LOTTO CO-ORDINATOR.

2

you gotta love how stupid some people can be - the human population certainly does provide major entertainment sometimes…
example:

...electronic balloting System [b]without the winner applying[/b], we are congratulating you...
but then
For security reasons, we advice all winners to keep this information confidential from the public until your claim is processed and your prize released to you. This is part of our security protocol to avoid double claiming and unwarranted abuse of this programme by [i]non-participant [/i] or unofficial personnel.
but i thought they said
...collects all the e-mail ID of the people that are online...
so that must mean EVERYBODY is a participant???

anyway, an e-mail promising huge sums of money, asking for personal details, and containing so many grammatical errors is sure to be a scam…

3

The phone number is from Ghana, and you would think that “Fiduciary Agent Dr. Ralph Winter of Microsoft Corporation Worldwide” would use a microsoft.com email address instead of a free webmail address located at the bottom of Africa :stuck_out_tongue:

4

yeah - also like how they need you to tell them how much you won… if they are giving you this prize, shouldn’t they kinda keep track of that? ::slight_smile:

do you suppose there are actually people in the world dumb enough to fall for this kind of thing?

5

On second thoughts it’s quite clear that this is NOT a scam. Firstly, Dr Knight has a PhD, and we PhDs don’t tell porkie pies. Secondly, as everyone knows, MS are having tax problems in Washington state and they have therefore moved their head office to Ghana, where corporate taxes are far lower. Thirdly, they are using webmail addresses because their Exchange Server has gone down AGAIN, which will surprise no one with any experience of MS software. Fourthly, they HAVE to give the money away or it will be ruthlessly taken by European anti-trust lawyers.

But if you were thinking of claiming, you’re too late, I’ve already sent off my banking details and PIN numbers, by this time tomorrow I’ll be RICH! Just told the boss to shove his crappy job where the sun doesn’t shine, too. I’m so happy.

6

String them along with fictitious info from a purpose-selected gmail address until it comes time to supply your banking details, which they’ll surely request. Then send them a 100 MB HTML mail with “Banking Details” in the subject line, but containing lots of high-resolution photos of birds, dogs, playground amenities, the sea, etc. – and a strategic “And just how stupid do you think I am?”

Also, IIRC Europol has an online facility for reporting such shenanigans – purely for statistical and tracking purposes, as I understand it.

'Luthon64

7

I heard of a trick once which can make the “revenge” even more enjoyable. If you make your 100MB file a 1GB html file, zip it, add another copy of the 1GB HTML, zip them both, and so on; then mail it to them. Adding lots of text will give you a good compression ratio. If they use anti-virus software on their mail server it will unzip the files to check for viri. Unzipping a couple of 1GB files into memory can really mess up the day for your mail server.
Just a thought.

8

Using certain Macrodaft products is a lottery.