A lottery scam is a type of advance-fee fraud which begins with an unexpected email notification, phone call, or mailing (sometimes including a large check) explaining that "You have won!" a large sum of money in a lottery. The recipient of the message—the target of the scam—is usually told to keep the notice secret, "due to a mix-up in some of the names and numbers," and to contact a "claims agent." After contacting the agent, the target of the scam will be asked to pay "processing fees" or "transfer charges" so that the winnings can be distributed, but will never receive any lottery payment. Many email lottery scams use the names of legitimate lottery organizations or other legitimate corporations/companies, but this does not mean the legitimate organizations are in any way involved with the scams. Identification There are several ways of identifying a fake lottery email: Unless someone has bought a ticket, one cannot have won a prize. There are no such things as "email" draws or any other lottery where "no tickets were sold". This is simply another invention by the scammer to make the victims believe that they have won. The scammer will ask the victims to pay a fee in advance to receive their prize. All genuine lotteries simply subtract any fees and tax from the prize. Regardless of what the scammer claims this fee is for (such as courier charges, bank charges, or various imaginary certificates), these are all fabricated by the scammer to obtain money from victims. Scam lottery emails will nearly always come from free email accounts such as Outlook, Yahoo!, Hotmail, Live, MSN, Gmail etc. Scam emails will often insist that the recipient keep their win confidential; this is done to avoid others advising them that the email is a scam. There will often be inconsistencies between currencies and countries, such as for example the message being sent to an individual who lives in the UK and claiming the amount won to be in US dollars and the lottery itself to be based in South Africa. As with the vast majority of scam email messages in general, lottery scam messages often contain spelling and/or grammatical issues. Most email lottery scams are a type of advance fee fraud. Mis-selling by lottery "win" Another type of lottery scam is a scam email or web page where the recipient had won a sum of money in