Every day thousands, if not millions of people receive emails to tell them that they have won a bunch of money in an online lottery or sweepstakes competition. In most cases these lotteries or sweepstakes are competitions that the recipient of the email has ever entered. The lesson in this is beware of anyone that tells you by email that you have won money in a lottery. Particularly if you never knew that you took part.

Many of these scams ask you for your personal details and also maybe to send a cash amount to be able to release the funds to you. Whatever you do, don’t reply to these people. If you have not entered a lottery or sweepstakes then you are not going to win it and it probably does not exist.

The first thing I would advise you to do if you have received an email from someone saying that you have won money in a lottery and you are wondering if it could be true or not, is to google a key phase from the email – maybe they give you an email address to respond to – then google something like ‘lottery win’ and the email address. You should be able to bring up some results that show if this is a scam or not.

Nothing for life generally comes for free so remember this whenever you get any of these emails. If you really have won some money then no doubt they will try and contact you by other means, they will not just randomly email you and then give up. So, much as you might want it to be true, your best bet is just to ignore and delete these emails and never to give out any of your personal information to these people.