What’s The Lottery Scam?

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.

It’s 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.

Movie Scams

Scams are attempts to mislead someone with the intent being a gain. This gain can be many things, but it is usually financial. Scams are also great subjects for movies and television shows.

The Rainmaker was made in 1956 and tells the story of a woman that falls for a man that runs scams related to making rain come to a community.

The Hustler was a movie made in 1961 that deals with scams related to billiards. The story unfolds about a young pool player named Eddie Felson.

The star of The Music Man was Robert Preston. The story centers on scams that the main character did to collect a lot of money from various towns. He would pre-sell them musical instruments and promise to make them a town band, which was just a lie.

Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve are both movies that deal with scams and scam artists. The movie Ocean’s Eleven from 2001 was actually a remake of a 1960 film with the same name. The cast was star-studded and the made a lot of money.

A 2002 Steven Spielberg movie called Catch Me If You Can dealt with scams. The main character was a teenager that forged checks and impersonated people.

Another movie about scams that did exceptionally well at the box office was The Usual Suspects. Kevin Spacey was fantastic as “Verbal” in this movie.

The Vanishing was a movie in which scams played a part. This movie was extremely creepy. This movie was originally released in 1988 and was French.

Michael Caine starred in The Italian Job in 1969. The plot revolves around the main character’s scams to stage a gold bullion robbery in Turin. The robbery was supposed to be achieved by sabotaging the city's traffic-control computer and escaping.