No one is a winner… (of the Yahoo! Lottery)

We regret to inform you that you did not win the Yahoo! lottery. Because there is no Yahoo! lottery. Please don’t send us money to claim your “winnings.”

Like other highly-visible brands, ours is a tempting one for fraudsters to hitch their wagons to. You probably have received an email or maybe even a text message on your mobile notifying you of a fabulous windfall you’ve won in a Yahoo! lottery. It usually tells you to send money or your account details. Don’t fall for it!!!!

We will never send you an email about a lottery or contest you never entered. And even though the email might look like it’s from Yahoo!, it’s not. Anyone with a Yahoo! account has a Yahoo! email address. These are unsolicited emails that should be ignored and deleted. They are usually poorly written with lots of grammatical and spelling mistakes. For example, take a look at this excerpt from the one of the most recent scams I’ve seen:

“So we appeal to you to have a bite patients to enable our Account Department carryout their works more effectively for smooth and sucessful tansfer of your winning prize $ 0ne million us dollars without any delay…”

And as more folks are getting wise to the scams, the scammers are getting more and more creative. They are employing more tricks like using pictures of the Yahoo! campus and even our logo (they get these from pictures that are available to anyone online).

As ridiculous as some of these cons may seem, we take them very seriously. Our Yahoo! Mail Abuse team looks into all reports of these scams and takes appropriate action. Plus, we are currently evaluating new filtering technology that may be effective in catching scams like this.

In the meantime, if you receive a message claiming to be from Yahoo! notifying you of a cash prize, please let us know! Just forward the message to mail-spoof@cc.yahoo-inc.com. Include the full email header (info on how to do that is here). The full header shows us the route the email took to get to your Inbox and helps us track down the culprits.

Our team really hates these scams — maybe even more than you. So help us knock them out before they hit someone else’s inbox.

Happy emailing!
Andrew – Yahoo Mail Team