Yahoo! Lottery Makes People Rich Overnight

A couple of Yahoo! mail users have recently found themselves winners at the lottery contest, in which they haven't even participated. According to the Yahoo! Mail Blog, a number of users have reported receiving a mail from the "Yahoo! Awards Center" that claims they are winners of a £845,000 prize. The notification states that the users have won the Yahoo! Lottery award and they "only" need to reply to the mail using all their personal information.

The Yahoo! Mail Blog clearly states that this is just another form of spam mail that also tries to get the users' personal information. The mail itself shouldn't be taken for anything else and, as stated on the blog, users are to ignore these sorts of messages. The blog post was released today, after no less than 6,000 users have took this issue to Yahoo! Answers in order to find a suitable solution.

The spam mails can feature the Yahoo! logo, but this doesn't necessarily mean that it is trustworthy. Similar practices have been proven over the years to be nothing less than scams, meant to steal personal information from various users. Ryan K., Community Manager at Yahoo! Mail, warns Yahoo! users about this sort of mails. He states that messages containing various forms of sudden financial winnings or requiring a user’s personal data shouldn't be trusted. He also directs the users to the Yahoo! Security Site where they can be better informed about potential online threats.

Spammers can be quite inventive when it comes to asking you for your sensitive account information. A number of schemes have been discovered over the years, most of which follow the same principle: copying a trustworthy company logo or security features and using them in a spam mail that demands personal data from users. So, if you are one of the victims of such mails, don't feel bad about not wining.

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