Microsoft, Yahoo team up against lottery hoax e-mails

You know all those hoax e-mails that arrive in your in box saying that you've won a lottery? You don't click on them, obviously, but many people do, enough to prompt Microsoft and Yahoo to form a coalition to warn consumers about the scam.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Western Union, and The African Development Bank are partnering to educate Internet users about the dangers of falling prey to the fake lottery winner e-mails.

In such scams, victims are told that they have won a lottery, often in a foreign country, and are then asked to provide their personal and financial information to claim the winnings. In the current economic downturn, the fear is that desperate people will be more likely to take the bait.

The announcement of the coalition, made at the 6th German Anti Spam Summit in Wiesbaden, Germany, coincided with the release of Microsoft-commissioned research on lottery scams in Europe.

Of 4,930 people surveyed, 113 people reported losing money to an Internet fraudster in the last year. Twenty-seven percent of Internet users surveyed predicted they would become a victim of a lottery scam and more than half said lottery scam e-mails scared them off from buying things online.

[geolemon]

Lottery hoax nothing... those are annoying but most of them are successfully filtered into my Spam folder (Yahoo email), and at least when you see them, you get a chuckle out of them.

The truly annoying ones are the ones I keep getting for Cialis, Viagra, etc. I keep clicking "report spam" when I get them, but another one always appears later - with the same user name but slight variance on the actual Email address. There's GOT to be a better way of capturing these!

[fredtheviking]

Geolemon, you might want to consider Gmail. It's spam filter works great at lease for me.

I think it sad people are still falling for these hoax. I think people just get excited by the idea of actually winning something. It feels great and they want it to be true. So, they get sucker into it.

[pjhenry1216]

I think the problem will slowly fade away in the future. Its a slow process, but each generation, fewer and fewer people are unfamiliar with cyberspace. More and more people will know the dead giveaways as to what makes an email a hoax. Things we consider huge red flags aren't as obvious to people who aren't that in tune with the internet society. This may eventually be the ultimate solution to spam and hoaxes alike (as they really aren't all that different). Eventually, the pool of people that fall for these things or click on spam will get smaller and smaller. Hopefully, the profit margin will get smaller and smaller and maybe, just maybe, disappear.