Scams through online lotteries

While there are some reliable, legal, and non-fraudulent lotteries out there (including our own service, of course), there are also plenty of online lottery scams that are simply designed to take your money without any serious chance of winning a prize. In this article, we will give you some info on the various online lottery scams.

The “You just won the lottery” email scam

Most people will eventually have found one of those emails in their inbox. Someone is telling you that you won Millions at the lottery – most of the time a lottery that you haven’t even played. Well, that is a pretty obvious scam attempt. If you do answer those emails, the scammers will be in touch, telling you that in order to get your money, you need to give them your bank account number and pay a “processing fee” so that they can release the payment. Those processing fees, of course, will be lost forever. And in some cases, it might even be worse because knowing your bank account details, the scammer might find a way to get access to the funds in your account.

The “free” lottery tickets scam

There are loads of websites that claim that they are holding lotteries that offer big prizes, and you can get a lotto ticket for free – all you have to do is sign up and choose your number. Now that sounds great – who would not like to have a shot at a big prize if it does not cost you a single dollar?

The problem is, that almost all of those free lotto sites are scams too. If you had the right numbers, you would probably not get paid, or they would publish a numbers combination that is 100% sure not to have been picked by anyone of their victims. So why do they run those sites – where is the profit in such an operation?

Well, it is your email address. You see, online marketers from all over the World pay good money for email addresses. Especially so if they are fresh and certain to be monitored by their owners. With tens of thousands of hopeful lottery winners signing up with these scam sites, they can quickly build a huge database. Hoping you might actually win something, you are going to keep an eye on that email account, waiting for the email that says you won something. So all those advertisements for the little blue pills or make-money-quick schemes will catch your attention too, and that is important for those marketers.

That said, you are better off not falling for this type of online lottery scam, or if you do decide to participate, at least use a “disposable” email address.

Freeloader lottery scams

Now those are especially difficult to see through. Let’s say you want to use a real lottery like Powerball or the Euromillions and kind of emulate that lottery, use the actual numbers drawn in that lottery and make some money for yourself. How do you do that?

Well, legal lottery operations like the New York Lottery usually pay out less than 60% of their revenues to their clients. The rest of the money generated by ticket sales covers their expenses. And it is no secret that a big part of the profit is being used for charity and financing education projects.

So since the lotto scammer does not have those expenses, he can easily offer tickets at a discount price. Of course, in order to keep his customers coming back, he’d pay out all the winners from his revenues.

Wait a minute – all the winners? What if someone wins a big amount of money, maybe even a multi-million jackpot? Of course, the scammer would go bankrupt if he paid that out. But since he only has a couple of thousand customers, the chances of one of “his” tickets winning an amount that would break his bank are slim to none. He’d still make a ton of money, and probably pay no taxes – so this lottery scam would be quite lucrative, even long term.

Taxes on Lottery Winnings

Do I Have to Pay Taxes on Lottery Winnings? read more

How can you tell that an online lottery is legit?

In order to be sure whether it is a legitimate online lotto service, they would have to give you physical proof that a lottery ticket has actually been purchased for you, with the original lottery itself. That way, you would have a claim against the lottery commission, and not just against the company that you bought the ticket from.

And this is the difference between our ticket service and the many online lottery scammers out there. We do buy a real lottery ticket for you. The purchase will be made by one of our agents, and we have agents in every country and state of the 20+ international lotteries we are offering online tickets for.

Then we scan it and email it to you, and if you win, you can claim your winnings from the lottery company. We will even help you process your claim. Our customers have won Millions over the years and we have helped all their winners to their money, without charging any fees for it.

So, don’t fall for online lottery scams – use our reliable and legitimate online lotto ticket service for the world’s largest jackpots.