Facebook Powerball Lottery Scam

Facebook Powerball Lottery Scam

Facebook does a lot of things, but a lottery is definitely not one of them.

Here's how the scam typically works:

A friend, often a newly added friend sends you a message saying they won the Facebook Powerball Lottery, and you should check, too, to see if you also won. Typically, this friend is someone you added recently and don't really know, but it could also be from a friend you do know, whose computer was hacked.

Your "friend" tells you to contact another person via Facebook to check and collect your winnings. In order to collect, however, you are told you must make two Western Union wire transfers totaling anything from a few hundred dollars to a $1,000, to an someone in South Africa, supposedly, to cover the taxes. Of course, the money never comes. If you see your friend and ask about the lottery, you will find they have no knowledge of it.

This is a simple "con" or "Advanced Fee" scam.  The scammer gains your confidence by appearing to be your friend, then the scammer will ask you for your personal information, including your address. The scammer will then say your winnings check will be sent to you by FedEx and they will contact you to pay a little fee, in order to deliver the check. Of course, the person who then contacts you will be another scammer posing as a FedEx employee to collect the fee.

You can see an ABC news story about this scam here.

How to avoid the Facebook Powerball Lottery scam?

Do not accept friendship invitations from people you don't know. Scammers can easily steal somebody else's picture off the Internet and use it to impersonate a friend of yours or someone you would respect. You can also report the scam on this page: Federal Trade Commission Report.

 

 Also see this page for a sample in the UK.

Names of Scam / Fake / Fraud Lottery 

Click here for the huge list of the names of the currently identified lottery scams companies

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And please let us know about any suspicious calls or emails you receive.  We look for patterns so that we can alert the authorities and victims to new scams, before it is too late!

 

 

 

For a comprehensive list of national and international agencies to report scams, see this page.