Is there such a contest as the 2006 Yahoo! Mid-Year Gift Dash?

Is there a contest going on at Yahoo at this time involving $ 2,000,000.00?

• I have received an e-mail in another account I have telling me I have won a prize. This is what was sent: This is to inform you that you have won prize money of TWO MILLION US DOLLARS ($2,000,000.00) for the YEARLY Lottery promotion which is organized byYahooLottery INC for the introduction of the new YAHOO BETA MAIL which all YAHOO users are required to switch onto. YAHOO! MAIL INC & WINDOWS LIVE arrange and gather all the e-mail addresses of the people that are active online, among the millions that subscribed to all email Address, and others we only select Nine (9) candidates per annually as our winners through Electronic Balloting System (EBS) without the candidate applying, we congratulate you for being one of the people selected. PAYMENT OF PRIZE AND CLAIM We are sorry that your Payment Approval File was sent to Africa (Republic of Ghana) due to we have 3 lucky winners in Africa so that you can be cleared and paid simultaneously there. You are to contact our Location Claim Agent on or before your date of Claim.YahooBeta Lottery Prize must be claimed not later than 14 days from date of Draw Notification after the Draw date in which Prize has won. Note: Any prize not claimed within this period (14 days) will be forfeited. These are your identification numbers: Batch Number.......................YMLN-EBS-77… Ref Number...........................YMLN-EB… Winning Number...................YMLN-EBS-00BXAF These Numbers above fall within the agents Location file, you are requested to contact your Agent and send your Identification Numbers and Personal Information to him. OUR FIDUCIARY CLAIM OFFICE E-mail:[email protected] You are therefore advised to send the following information to him to facilitate them and process the transfer of your fund with the appointed paying bank. Send your Identification Numbers/Your Personal Information to him immediately: Personal Information 1. Full Name: …………………………………… 2. Nationality: …………………………………… 3. Contact Address: ……………………....…… 4. Telephone Number: ………………....……… 5. Marital Status: ………………….......………… 6. Occupation: ……………………...…………… 7. Age/ Gender: ………………...……………… We hope you're enjoying your new Yahoo! Mail account. Winners shall be paid in accordance with his/her Settlement Center. Now take the next step and claim your Prize and say thanks to Yahoo! You select how to transfer the prize money to you: Bank Draft/Cheque Delivery to Your Address (YES) Bank to Bank Transfer (NO) By Cash Delivery to your Address (NO) NOTE: NOBODY WILL TOUCH YOUR MONEY FOR ANY REASON AND AN AFFIDAVIT OF CLAIM WILL BE PRESENTED TO THE BANK BY THE HIGH COURT OF GHANA, BEFORE THE BANK CAN RELEASE YOUR MONEY. See what's happening on Yahoo.com today. Do you Yahoo!? If you have questions or wish to claim your prize money kindly contact this email. Sees the instructions at the body of this message. Copyright © 2010 Yahoo! All rights reserved. |Copyright/IP Policy|Terms of Service|Privacy Policy It was sent from - YAHOO! MAIL LOTTERY TEAM ([email protected]) I think this is not real - can you verify this one way or the other please. Thx, Wayne Gatt

• Answer:

  100% scam. There is no lottery. There is no Yahoo, Coca-Cola, MSN, Microsoft, BMW or any other company in the entire world that sponsors a lottery that notifies winners via email. There is only a scammer trying to steal your hard-earned money. The next email will be from another of the scammer's fake names and free email addresses pretending to be the "lottery official" and will demand you pay for made-up fees and taxes, in cash, and only by Western Union or moneygram. Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever. Now that you have responded to a scammer, you are on his 'potential sucker' list, he will try again to separate you from your cash. He will send you more emails from his other free email addresses using another of his fake names with all kinds of stories of great jobs, lottery winnings, millions in the bank and desperate, lonely, sexy singles. He will sell your email address to all his scamming buddies who will also send you dozens of fake emails all with the exact same goal, you sending them your cash via Western Union or moneygram. Do you know how to check the header of a received email? If not, you could google for information. Being able to read the header to determine the geographic location an email originated from will help you weed out the most obvious scams and scammers. Then delete and block that scammer. Don't bother to tell him that you know he is a scammer, it isn't worth your effort. He has one job in life, convincing victims to send him their hard-earned cash. Whenever suspicious or just plain curious, google everything, website addresses, names used, companies mentioned, phone numbers given, all email addresses, even sentences from the emails as you might be unpleasantly surprised at what you find already posted online. You can also post/ask here and every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find before taking a chance and losing money to a scammer.