Absolutely not. I get those emails 3-4x a day. Leave them alone.
Read on:
Several international lottery scams are in operation today with an aim of tempting people to enter a lottery and then disappearing without a trace. However, none of these lotteries are legal. They are just spam mails in disguise whose main purpose is to get confidential personal information from the recipients. Their mode of operation is simple. An individual first receives a spam e-mail stating that he has won the jackpot in an international lottery that he has not even entered. Their objective is to get access to one’s personal information and convincing one to pay an up-front fee, which covers taxes, customs, and wire transfers.
Another major fraud was the Nigerian 419 scam, which offered millions of dollars if one paid a few thousand dollars up-front. However, the money was lost forever and none of the individuals who paid up ever heard from the company again. Some individuals have received e-mails requesting them to send £7,000 or €5,625 to collect their winnings. One then receives another forged letter from the Gaming Board of Great Britain, asking for €20,000. At least ten thousand innocent people have been victims of this spam mail.
This Lotto International lottery has assumed menacing proportions and several thousand people have lost money to dubious organizations because of their greed or innocence. One must remember that an international company like Lotto International will never mail somebody who has not event participated in their contest. Therefore, it is best to stay away from such fantastic international lottery claims. Most of the victims are the elderly who live on social security. They readily part with personal information and credit card details in the hope of earning easy money. The scamsters misuse the credit card to make unauthorized purchases and run up huge bills. In the end, they land up with huge financial setbacks.
The authorities have taken some steps to combat this fraud. They have set up a resource center to help fight high value fraud, including spam e-mails. Some fraudsters do not even buy the lottery tickets while others keep the lottery winnings for themselves. However, individuals have to take care and be alert when receiving such mails. At the first instance, these should be deleted, and one should warn friends and colleagues about such mails. One should not reply to them nor fill the claim forms supplied in the mails. One should keep away from foreign lotteries, as they are illegal and the chances of recovering one’s money are slim.
One should never share personal financial details like bank account number and credit card numbers with strangers. It is advisable to avoid visiting dubious links, which have contacts with fraud lottery organizers. These sites and links are usually copies of the original websites and cleverly designed to imitate the original and mislead people. It is easy to detect such sites if one carefully analyzes the content of the site and the contact details, which will invariably list a cell phone number and no address. An intelligent way to avoid these mails is to report to the authorities to verify the claims and to return the mails to the concerned local postmaster. Therefore, mental vigilance is the only sure way to avoid falling for doubtful lottery scams.