Lottery scam (fraudulent) emails are increasing at an alarming rate.
Scam emails try to persuade the email receiver to submit personal information or to part with money as an up front payment in order to release a winning lottery prize.
As a general rule, if you have not purchased a ticket for the UK National Lottery, you won’t have won a prize, and you should treat the email with absolute caution.
The following points are some things to look for in order to identify a fraudulent email:
- If the email says ‘Winning Notification’ or ‘Lottery Sweep Stake’ in the text, the email you’ve received is not from UK National Lottery;
- We don’t tell players how much they've won in an email; and
- We don’t ask for any Player information like name, address or bank details on an email.
There is no need to contact us if you have received a lottery related scam (fraudulent) email.
As we are constantly looking to improve our communication with our players, we have now changed all our email addresses to the following:
- admin@national-lottery.co.uk
- player@national-lottery.co.uk
- play@national-lottery.co.uk
- help@national-lottery.co.uk
- play@play.national-lottery.co.uk
We will now use only these addresses to send you all important communication such as purchase confirmations and rollover alerts.
To ensure your National Lottery emails reach you please add us to your Address Book or Safe Senders' List. Find out how to add us to your Address Book.
Common Lottery Scams - Further assistance:
The National Lottery website is safe and secure. Nevertheless, you need to be on your guard against Internet fraudsters. Below are details of some of the more common fraudulent activities:
Email scams that claim you have won a Lottery prize
These scams work in two ways:
Method 1: Persuade the victim to part with personal information to allow the scammers to carry out Identity Theft.
Method 2: Persuade the victim to part with money as an up front payment in order to release a winning Lottery prize which does not exist.
Signs of a fraudulent email:
- There may be a sense of urgency, eg ‘respond within X days or your Account will be closed’
- There may be embedded links (links within the body of the email) that look legitimate because they contain all or part of a real company’s name. These links may take you to spoof sites which ask you to update personal information, or may download key-logging software onto your PC
- Spoof websites can be difficult to spot. To make sure you’re on our site, type www.national-lottery.co.uk into your browser and see if you arrive at the same place
Spoof websites (known as ‘phishing’)
Fraudsters create false or ‘spoof’ websites that look very real, with the aim of persuading users to enter personal information such as passwords and memorable information. They will then re-use this information to access your Account. Customers get emails claiming to be from official websites asking them to click on a link within the email to the ‘spoof’ site.
The National Lottery would never ask you to email us with confidential information.
In order to protect yourself from such scams, we advise the following:
- Don’t click on links in unsolicited emails
- Never send any up-front fees required in order to ‘claim your prize’
- Never disclose personal information or financial information via email or a ‘claims’ or ‘verification’ form
- If you wish to visit a particular website, always key in the address directly rather than using an embedded link
- Always remember, where you wish to discuss your Account with us, we will always verify your identity by asking specific security questions disclosed to us when you set up your Account. Our Interactive Customer Care team do not have access to your full password
Remember, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is!
For details of other websites that carry useful information on Internet security and current scams, see our useful websites page.
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