I just recieved an email that sounds like a money scam. who do i contact to report it?

I can answer this question for you fine. Do not send these people any money or personal information! You can be 100% sure that you haven't won anything right now and here's an explanation of exactly what the notice you've recieved is intended to do. If you are already a victim contact the U.S. Secret Service via email. This address will be provided toward the end of this answer! I would laugh at the proposed scam and surely not respond to the punks responsible. There are many Nigerian scams that are showing up nowadays. Please read the following carefully: I can guarantee you that if you listen to these punks you will lose every bit of money you have and never receive any prize money as such a prize does not exist. Another new popular scam is the lottery scam: There is no British National Lottery Award, Overseas Lottery International, YAHOO & MSN Lotteries, Yahoo online dept., UK (United Kingdom) Lottery, Netherlands Lottery, British Lottery, Thunderball Online Lottery in the UK, Australian Lottery, Spanish Lottery, UK/FRANCO/GERMANY Lottery, Yahoo Lottery Microsoft Lottery (emmulating from the UK or anywhere else) or any other form of lottery you can win without buying a ticket. While some people might only copy and paste such email to their answer with a brief take on it, I will go into detail because I'm tired of this trash, as several of my friends have lost their a$$es to this scam. This is about as far away from legitimate as anything can get, whether it be a contest, promotion, or whatever. The Euro Asian whatever you talk about is a perfect example of how you can hand your lifesavings over to some fat-sweaty nigerian con-man (and your i.d. too). There exists a certain form of immoral degenerate that trolls the internet searching for suckers who believe that they have gotten very lucky and won a lottery which they have never entered. They will probably entice you to send an advance fee to claim your non-existant winnings and if you do send this money, you can kiss it goodbye. The money will likely be en-route to Nigeria, a cesspool of fraud that has been the center of these types of fraud over the last few decades. The best thing to do is to delete such emails immediately and to never reply to them. If you even reply, you risk having your email inbox flooded. If you call these people, expect to be harrassed over the phone at all hours of the night! In some cases, people who travel to claim their winnings in Nigeria are taken hostage, and in worse-case scenarios are killed when whoever is paying ransom payments exhausts their money supply. If anything online sounds to good to be true it always is buddy. By the way, I have kind of become an anti-scam activists due to the fact that I have many friends who have had their identities and life savings stolen from them via these methods. This is simply advance fee fraud (a prevalent type of fraud which continously asks for money to cover unforseen expenses) and is intended to drain your bank account, promising money that simply does not exist. Hopefully, this answers your question. If you have any more questions, do a yahoo search on lottery scams, nigeria 419 scams, internet fraud, or advance fee fraud. You can also read more about this at www.secretservice.gov and www.419eater.com! If you have lost money you should report it to the U.S. Secret Service at www.secretservice.gov Now you know the basics of Advance Fee Fraud, a multi-million dollar industry that costs honest people their life savings everyday. Be happy you weren't duped by this scam!

Just delete it, or better yet, report it as spam. Don't bother contacting law enforcement, the FBI and probably most state level law enforcement already have task forces working on such scams. About all they can do is file a report anyway, no law enforcement in America has any jurisdiction to prosecute scams originating in another country. Simply adhere to the old saying: "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." My first experience like yours came from Nigeria. I thought I was being a good citizen by contacting law enforcement, but the local police didn't know what to do except have me make a printed copy of it, my guess is it got lost on the way to the police department. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation was much friendlier and helpful, an agent contacted me by phone and asked for an attachment of the email containing the full headers. He corresponded a few times, informed me of the FBI task force, and explained the jurisdictional problems. I sent him a few more over the next several months, until he asked me to stop, and to just get them blocked as spam, the scammers exchange lists of gullible, potential victims. You'd be better off reading a few security articles from Technology news about the danger of opening emails from people you don't know. And never open an attachment from someone you don't know, it could contain code that opens a back door to your computer so they can enter without your knowledge and cause mischief, wipe your hard drive out, even use your computer to send out more scam emails. You were smart to ask your question, now study computer security from legitimate sources like Yahoo, Webroot, Symantec, and major news organizations with a technology section. And before you do anything else, check that your firewall is active, get antivirus and antispyware software if you don't have it, keep them updated and scan your computer regularly. Good luck.

I haven't had much luck reporting these things. Your email service won't care unless the scammers account is with them. Here is a federal email address where you send unwanted Spam to, I don't know if they'll do anything about the scam or not: [email protected].