A lottery scam is a type of advance fee fraud. Typically, a person is notified that he or she has won a lottery. In order to receive the prize money or item, the target is told that they must pay some sort of administration fee or some similar bogus fee. Of course once this amount of money is paid, the target never hears from the so-called lottery representatives again.

Its easy to see that this sort of small-scale scam can really rake in the bucks just by targeting as many people as possible. And the internet is the perfect arena for this type of scam. Email is free and it takes only some software and a few clicks to send the scam email to hundreds or thousands of people.

Another variation of this type of scam is notifying targets that they have won some type of cash prize or trip vacation trips are common prizes in this type of scam. When the target shows up to claim the prize they are told that some sort of purchase is necessary. As the scammers read the target, they try to get the target to pay for as much crap as possible. Sometimes these types of scams try to get targets to buy items as much as thirty times what the prize is worth.

If you have been notified of some type of lottery winning, take a look at http://ScamDex.com or http://worldwidespam.info/lottery-scams to see if the scammers have been indexed already. If not, you should probably do us all a favor and submit the information your received for review by one of these scam awareness organizations.