I won a foreign lottery. Can you believe it?
I think it's wonderful that Ireland has so much money that they can pick an email address at random and give away over a million pounds sterling. Now, a normal lottery works by having people put money into it. But someone in Ireland is so prosperous they can just give away huge amounts of money to strangers. From other countries.
My troubles are over. I haven't figured the exchange rate, but it still has to be a lot of money. Published? Who needs to be published? I'm rich. Think of all the things I can do now.
If you didn't catch the sarcasm in my starry-eyed rambling, you don't know me very well. I think I'm intelligent enough to know that this was a scam, even if I hadn't read an article about it just the week before. It's illegal to participate in foreign lotteries, as far as I know. Which is probably why this email stated that my address was selected at random.
The email didn't ask for any information that would immediately arouse suspicion--if it hadn't already been aroused. But I know that if I had responded, they would have asked me for a check to cover some fees. Then, I could have sent them a legitimate check for $5,000 or so, and they'd have sent me their bogus check for over a million pounds.
I forwarded the email to spam@uce.gov. If you receive any kind of email scam, please do the same.
The part that really makes me mad is that they sent it to this email address. The one I reserve solely for this blog, and the contacts I make through critiquing.
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6 comments:
Anytime you post an e-mail address on the Internet, even if you put spaces around the @ character, it won't take long before a crawler finds it and it is is added to someone's list of e-mail addresses that hey send spam to.
Any tips on making my email address secure on a website? What I'd really like is an "email me" link that opens an email application. There must be a secure way to do that, but I'm not computer literate enough to know.
Tina,
You disillusion me. Does this mean that the money I wired to that guy in Nigeria won't bring me a fortune?
Don't worry, Richard. I'm pretty sure that Nigerian thing is legit. ;o)
I'm glad you'd never fall for something like this...
...and a bit put out that somewhere, somebody thinks the Irish are still spending British sterling.
But don't worry, Tina; when I win a real Irish lottery, I'll share it with you! And I'll send the rest of it to the Anti-Spam League.
Tina, you might ask Michelle Hutchison how to protect this & other e-mail addys. She's the best tech-savvy person I know.
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