Today I wanted to talk about the "David Dawes" scam which has been making the rounds since at least October of 2011.
In this scam, the idiot criminal who sends the spam message wants you to believe that he is David Dawes of the UK, who is giving away his lottery winnings to you and thousands of other complete strangers.
Here's a link which is commonly posted in these scam messages which is a real news story about the win:
£101m lottery jackpot winners Dave and Angela Dawes to give millions to friends and family
The key paragraph in this news story is as follows:
But along with treats for themselves, they have decided to share their luck with up to 20 close friends and family, giving each a million pounds.
That's twenty (20) close friends, not thousands of complete strangers.
The news media are well aware of the existence of this scam.
A spokesman for the lottery that the Dawes won back in October 2011 has spoken on the record, stating that this type of ridiculous scam message is 100% false, and that they have no plans to share their winnings with millions of strangers via email:
http://petchonka.com/lottery-email-scam-targets-euromillions-winners-dave-and-angie-dawes/
Spokesman for the UK lottery organization Camelot Simon Horne confirmed the emails are not from Dave or Angie Dawes and those who receive such a message need to proceed with caution.
This is OBVIOUSLY a scam, and should be ignored, or - better yet - you can report their email addresses to their providers, which are always a free email provider like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Gmail. You can do this very easily by using my handy Nigerian ScamerAtor™ tool. You can grab that here:
http://bit.ly/TxcMqc
Believe me: it works. The scammers hate this tool. The email providers you report to will often shut the offending accounts down within the same day you report them.
Here is a recent example of this idiotic, obvious scam message. In particular I love that the subject is usually "This is a personal email directed to you", as if the function of putting an email address in the "to" field of a new message was to send it to someone completely different than the recipient.
You're welcome.
SiL
Subject: This is a personal email directed to you... Reply-To: davedaweas@yahoo.cn Mail-Reply-To: davedaweas@yahoo.cn -- Dear friend, This is a personal email directed to you. I am Dave Dawes, my fiancee andI won a Jackpot Lottery of 101 million pounds ($156 million) inOctober, and have voluntarily decided to donate the sum of 1 millionpounds ($1.56 million) to you as part of our own charity project toimprove the lot of 5 unknown lucky individuals all over the world plus 15close friends and family. If you have received this email then you areone of the lucky recipients and all you have to do is get back to us sothat we can send your details to the delivery courier company. You can verify this by visiting the web pages below. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8820 740/101m-lottery-jackpot-winners-Dave-and-Angela-Dawes-to-gi ve-millions-to-friends-and-family.html Best of luck, Dave Dawes.Email: davedaweas@yahoo.cn
