U.k National Lottery emailed a letter stating i had won the uk national lottery/by being part of our experimental bonanza, therefore contact Mr Harling White at claimsoffice001@telkom.net and send full names, dob, sex, marital status, contact address, and phone numbers Ripoff Liverpool United Kingdom Internet

Looks to good to be true

Dear Winner, (please be advised yours or any e-mail address does not appear in the letter head).

We are pleased to inform you of the final announcement that you are one of our new year winners of the HERITAGE LOTTERY FUND, Please provide him with your batch number BATCH:2007MJL-01 and your reference number REF NO:HLF/200-26937 held on the 28th of January, 2007. You have therefore been approved to claim a total sum of 1,500,000.00 ( One Million Five Hundred Thounsand (2.9 million USD) Pounds)only.

Please contact your claims agent below for your price providing himwith the underlisted infomation: Name:- Mr. Andrdew Peterson. Contact E-mail:hlfclaimsagent012@myway.com

1. Full Names: 2. Address: 3. Age: 4. Sex: 5. Marital Status: 6. Occupation: 7. Phone numbers: 8. Fax number: 9. Country: 10.Choice of Delivery ------------

(a) Check Delivered by Courier--------------- (meaning choosing a courier like FedEx or UPS were you have to pay at a minimum up to $20.000 in order to receive this winning) call these companies and ask if this is legit!

(b) Cash collection at our payment centre in holland. (meaning you have to travel to Holland to collect this winning only to find out that such Fund is fictitious and none existing after you paid thousands for travel expenses).

Faithfully,
Mr. Neil Bridge
Zonal Co-ordinator

These and similar mails are received by millions daily from all over the world. According to the FBI International con artists use lottery scams such as this to defraud Americans out of more than $120 million a year.

Further,Federal law prohibits the cross-border sale or purchase of lottery tickets by phone or mail.

Foreign lottery scam artists will drain your bank account or steal the money you sent to pay for the tickets, duties, and taxes.

The FBI website is giving valuable info regarding these scams and how it can be stopped in that for example the FBI partnered with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and others to identify, disrupt, and dismantle organizations perpetrating these schemes, to seize the proceeds of their operations, and to return stolen money to victims.

Thanks to these partnerships, a Canadian man was sentenced to 78 months in a U.S. prison on July 17 after pleading guilty to racketeering, mail and wire fraud, and conspiracy for his role in a lottery scheme that stole more than $8 million from elderly widows and widowers in the U.S.

Further, according to FBI advice "Don't respond to calls, e-mails, or mailings promoting foreign lotteries. If you think you've been victimized by one of these scams, report it to your local FBI office. Or, if you were scammed online, file a complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center".

You better of buying state lottery tickets were you have more luck to win than ever seeing any winnings from these cons.

In my state a lot of Banks and Western Union warn costumers by posting warnings regarding these and other schemes including Nigerian letter fraud at every counter with contact info.

Even our local Newspaper had several write ups with local law enforcement warnings and info. That in itself should WARN people.