We just received this ridiculous phishing scheme email that appeared to originate from Yahoo and requests the recipient to send their information so a representative can call them to claim the prize. Wow, a prize of £500,000.00 would be approximately $1,014,497.16 USD at the current conversion rate of 1 GBP = 2.02899 USD. that seems like quite a lot of money to win from Yahoo. However, one look at the contents tells you that this is nothing but another phishing scheme designed to scam unsuspecting internet users. We’ve actually been receiveing quite a few of these lottery type phishing email of recent and I’ve seen two different news stories on people who’ve fallen for these scheme. The majority of the originate from Nigeria and believe it or not, clever scammers have setup entire offices staffed with employees with computers who do nothing all day but send these spam emails and answer phones when a victim calls thinking they’ve won a prize. A look at the complete headers for this particular email shows it was generated from a webserver located in the United Arab Emirates on the DigitalSkys network: from 86.62.13.126 ([86.62.13.126]) by russianhillbookstore.com and the fact it’s using a yahoo.co.uk email address would make a victim think the phishing email had come from the United Kingdom.

Please beware of these lottery type of phishing emails. They will ask you to wire them funds or send them a check in order for you to claim your prize. You will be bilked out of your money and you’ll receive nothing in return. It never suprises me how many people actually fall for these schemes, but just remember, if you really have won some type of lottery, you will not be emailed notification and you will never be asked to send any money to claim your prize.