Oh my! My email made me a millionaire!

Good news keep coming to people's email accounts. Some of us have received irresistible offers to buy medicines and counterfeit products, some others have been selected to answer an online customer service survey in exchange of a monetary gratification from a bank in which we don't even have an account... but only a few of us are fortunate enough to win a lottery prize for which we didn't even buy a ticket!

I felt so lucky a couple of days ago, when I checked my email and found there a new message that got my attention right away. The subject was "Congratulation===Ref:PRLUK/56POLG/02", and it read as follows:

Premier League Lottery Sweepstakes,
Corporate Headquarters,
91 Station Road,
West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 7LT,
United Kingdom.
*****************************
Ref:PRLUK/56POLG/02
Batch: 02/78/2010
*****************************

                      NOTIFICATION

The Premier League Lottery program held in London 2008.
Happily announce to you the draw of your e-mail address
attached to ticketnumber:512-20658001-034 with Serial
number 0712/04 drew the lucky numbers:20-4-11-19-05-1,
which subsequently won you the lottery prize in
the 2nd category. You have therefore been approved to
claim a total sum of GBP£1,000,000.00 (One Million Great
Britain pounds) in cash credited to file C/9080118308/02.
This is from a total cash prize of GBP£50 Million
pounds, shared amongst the first fifteen (15)
lucky winners in this category.

CLAIMS PROCEDURES:
AGENT: Mr.Gary Rodney/Mrs.Jewel Thompson
Email: premier.officer02@yahoo.com.hk
Phone:  +447031901402
+447031901403

Yours Faithfully,
Mr.Steve Hayes.
Premier League International

Exciting isn't it? But lots of questions came to my mind. For instance, what kind of generous organization was kindly rewarding me with £1 million for just having a free, web based email address? It was very interesting to find out that an organization based in England would be rewarding me with that kind of money, given the fact that I have never been myself to England. And the fact that the name of the lottery company is related to the English Premier Soccer League, along with the poor grammar to build some of the sentences in the message, makes it lose all credibility.

Another interesting detail is in the further actions to cash the prize. The lucky winner, in this case myself, has to contact either an individual named Gary Rodney or a lady named Jewel Thompson, both of whom can be reached in an email address belonging to the yahoo.com.hk domain. In other words, it's a free email account (which anyone can open freely, without any effort, and in a matter of minutes) held in the Yahoo-Hong Kong site. It is pretty bizarre that a company based in England has to open email accounts in Hong Kong, under the Yahoo domain. Is it possible that they don't have enough money to open their own domain (something like ...@premierlottery.co.uk) when they can give away prizes worth £50 million?

I decided to keep looking for things that didn't make any sense, and I certainly found them. I used some of the most popular search engines to find out more about this email message, and it looks that at least 5 more people 'won' money in this lottery... all of us with exactly the same ticket and serial numbers! What a coincidence. Just impressive.

There have been so many of these scams running through the internet lately, that someone decided to gather a compilation of lottery winning notification emails and publish them on a website. If you wish to have a nice time reading a few of these emails to find out all the incongruities and grammar mistakes, visit that page by clicking here.

I really wonder if there are people out there who can possibly take the bait of these cheap tricks...