Fake Yahoo/MSN Lottery EMail

A Twist on ‘MicroHoo’

I guess these scammers were counting on the merger between Microsoft and Yahoo! to go through. Clearly, our language is not all they don’t understand. Those two companies are, and have been for decades, strong competitors and at times, bitter rivals. Each has continuously either sought or hoped for the other’s demise. So the entire premise of this scam, a joint Yahoo/MSN Lottery, is on its face a farce.

To give them credit, they confused the issue enough by trying to pose as a separate entity from either of these companies, but stating that “YAHOO/MSN & MICROSOFT WINDOWS collects all the email addresses of the people that are active online” is an easily recognizable lie. There is no “Yahoo/MSN” and Windows runs on your desktop, not the web. Not yet, anyway.

Take my hand so I don’t stumble over these protruding scam flags. I’ll mark them in BOLD, for those who come after us…

Yahoo/Msn Lottery Incorporation (No way this is right. See above)
Baley House, Har Road Sutton,
Greater London SM1 4te
United Kingdom.(Period?)

Dear Winner,

This is to inform you that you have won a prize money ( no ‘a’ ) of One
Million Great Britain Pound Sterling’s ( written incorrectly with an apostrophe ) (£1,000.000.00) for the month of APRIL 2008 Lottery promotion which is organized by YAHOO/MSN LOTTERY INC & WINDOWS LIVE. YAHOO/MSN & MICROSOFT WINDOWS collects all the email addresses of the people that are active online among the millions that subscribed to Yahoo and Hotmail we only select five people every Month as our winners through electronic balloting System without the winner applying, we congratulate you for being one of the people selected. (Do I need to even add a comment here? That sentence, laid out in a single line, could stretch from Santa Barbara to Norfolk. If everything else in the email were perfect, that one sentence would expose the scammer.)

You are to contact the events manager.
These are your identification numbers:
Batch number…………………YM 09102XM
Reff number…………………..YM 35447XM
Winning number……………….DTYFM0988
Transfer Number…………………45009423
However you will have to fill and ( “fill out” ) submit this form to the events manager.

1. Full name…………..
2. Contact Address……..
3. Age………………..
4. Telephone Number…….
5. Sex………………..
6. Occupation:…………
7. State………………
8. Country……………. (There’s your identity)
9. Your Reference Number, Transfer Number and Batch number at the top of this mail.
(CONTACT EVENTS MANAGER)
Name:Mr walter cook ( CAPS )
Tell:+447031985750
E-mail: claim_officexyz@yahoo.com.hk (There’s the Yahoo address in, where else? Hong Kong.)

As scam emails go, this one’s fairly easy to spot. Even if you know nothing of the rivalry between Microsoft and Yahoo!, or the recent bid by MS to take over Yahoo!, you should still be able to see enough wrong with the other content to mark this one for the furnace. That one, long, run-on sentence that makes up over half of the 1st paragraph is enough for me.

A good rule of thumb is this: If there are MILLIONS of DOLLARS involved, the person in charge of it will possess a formal education including years of English usage. Allowing for style and grammatical quirks, there should be no more than 1 or 2 mistakes. And there should be absolutely zero glaring errors.

I am Jon. I write long sentences, but ( expletive deleted )!