Scam E-mails Abusing Tom Crist, Winner of Big Lottery, Target Internauts

According to security experts, Internauts must be careful about e-mails that pose as messages from Tom Crist the lottery winner from Canada asserting that an enormous amount of money awaits the recipient to collect following a selection of his e-mail id for the purpose, reports hoax-slayer.com dated January 13, 2014.

Specifically in the scam e-mail, Crist is said to have decided distributing his entire prize-money valuing $42m towards funding individuals, charitable and other organizations. Accordingly, the fortunate e-mail receiver is one of those selected for getting a huge $1.2m out of Crist's lottery award. The e-mail further asserts that the receiver's id selection was randomly done through a partying of Facebook and Google.

Now, a person named Crist does exist and he has indeed won certain award during one Canadian lottery. Moreover, indicating an intention for donating, he has indeed declared publicly that he'll give away the full $42m prize money in charity.

But, Crist hasn't sent the particular e-mail while the recipient too wouldn't get the promised amount from him, security analysts add.

Furthermore, the e-mail typically asks recipients for answering back with their names, addresses, telephone numbers, age and countries-of-origin.

It maybe that Crist is considering giving away his winnings, however, it doesn't mean in a random manner as described. Actually, the e-mails represent one advance fee fraud wherein scammers solicit different sums of money from the victims apparently for processing the prize award's transmission.

Besides money, there's also possibility of the scam e-mails duping the victims into divulging their financial and other personal information that could be exploited for committing ID-theft.

Scammers know pretty much that if they relate their schemes to any true story, widely known, then they've fairly good chances of fooling individuals. Within the aforementioned instance, the fraudsters have even used Google's and Facebook's names for making everything appear further genuine despite the two not having any association with the lottery.

Therefore, anybody getting the above e-mails must just erase them. And incase he has already been victimized, he should inform the police instantly, though there are slim chances of him ever regaining the lost money.

» SPAMfighter News - 1/24/2014