Scams and safety
Every version of the fake-prize scam runs the same machine. Understanding the shape of it is more useful than memorising any particular script.
The advance-fee lottery scam is one of the oldest frauds still running at industrial scale, and it survives because it does not depend on the details. The names change, the letterheads change, the payment rails change. The structure never does.
It has exactly one requirement: money must move from you to them before any money moves the other way. Everything else — the reference numbers, the official-looking seals, the "claims agent" with a direct line — exists to make that one transfer feel reasonable.
The Federal Trade Commission states the test in a single line: if you have to pay to get your prize, it is a scam. Real prizes are free. Mega Millions puts the same point from the operator's side: "No real lottery tells winners to put up their own money in order to collect a prize they have already won" (Mega Millions, Lottery Scams).
If you take nothing else from this article, take that. The rest is anatomy.
The approach arrives by email, text, phone call, letter, or increasingly a social-media message. It says you have won something — a jackpot, a car, a "free play" that turned into a prize.
Two structural facts make this stage detectable before you read a word of the content.
A real lottery does not know who you are. A retail ticket is a bearer instrument. The operator sells it to a terminal, not to a person; it holds no name, no address and no email against the transaction. There is no database from which a winner could be emailed, because the information was never collected. This is why no real lottery notifies winners by email or social media, and why the arrival of the notification — not its contents — is the tell.
The organisation named usually does not exist. Mega Millions publishes the invented bodies used in its name, including "United States National Lottery", "Mega Millions Mobile Lottery", "Mega Millions Corporation" and "Mega Millions International Lottery". As the operator notes, Mega Millions is a game, not an organisation — there is no head office to write to you. Whether an entity is real and licensed is checkable in minutes, and how to verify an operator's licence sets out the registers.
The FTC adds a detail worth knowing: the message that feels personally addressed to you went to a very large number of people. If a prize notice arrives by post, the postmark tells you — bulk rate means a mass mailing.
This is the load-bearing stage. You have "won"; now something small stands between you and the money.
The request is always framed as an obstacle rather than a payment: taxes, customs duties, processing fees, insurance on the transfer, courier charges, a bank release fee. The FTC lists exactly these framings, and its guidance is unambiguous that any of them means the same thing.
The framing does psychological work. "Send us money" gets refused. "The prize cannot clear customs until the duty is paid" invites you to solve a problem — and it borrows plausibility from real systems, because customs duties and withholding taxes genuinely exist.
They do not, however, work this way. In every real jurisdiction, deductions from a prize come out of the prize, taken by the payer before you receive anything. Nobody is ever asked to fund a deduction from their own bank account, for the obvious reason that the money to cover it is already sitting with the payer. Where prizes are taxed at source — the United States withholds federally before payout, Spain withholds above a threshold — the winner receives the net figure and never sees an invoice.
The payment methods requested are themselves diagnostic. The FTC notes that scammers insist on wire transfer, payment apps, gift cards, cash or cryptocurrency because those rails are hard to trace and hard to reverse. A genuine organisation paying you has no reason to care how you send it money. A criminal one cares enormously.
The first fee is small — small enough that paying it feels cheaper than arguing. It is also the only part of the operation that has to work.
Once a payment has been made, the fee does not end the process. A new obstacle appears: the transfer was blocked, a second authority requires clearance, an anti-money-laundering check must be funded, the exchange rate moved. Mega Millions describes the pattern plainly: "once a person is hooked, the scammer will keep asking for new 'fees' to process the 'prize', but no matter how much the victim keeps paying, there is never a prize."
Two things drive the escalation, and both are facts about the victim rather than the criminal.
Sunk cost. Each payment makes withdrawal more expensive, because withdrawing means accepting that everything already sent is gone. The same mechanism keeps players buying tickets through a losing run — see loss aversion and the sunk-cost trap.
Isolation. Requests for confidentiality — "your win must remain unannounced until legal release" — are standard, and they are not about security. Secrecy removes the single most effective intervention available, which is another person hearing the story out loud. Mega Millions lists being told to keep the win confidential as a warning sign in its own right.
A more dangerous variant reverses the flow. Instead of asking for money, they send you some.
A cheque arrives — a partial prize advance, an expenses payment — and you are asked to deposit it and forward a portion onwards. The FTC's explanation of why this works is a fact about banking rather than about fraud: the bank must make deposited funds available before it has finished verifying the cheque. Weeks later the cheque is found to be worthless, and the account holder — you — is liable for the full amount, including the part already forwarded.
Beyond the money, this stage carries a legal risk that people badly underestimate. Moving funds on behalf of strangers makes you a money mule. The US Department of Justice's Money Mule Initiative names prize fraud explicitly as a recruitment route: "Other people become money mules after being told they have won a sweepstakes" (DOJ). The department's guidance is blunt that knowingly moving money for illegal activity can lead to criminal charges, and that unknowing mules still enable harm to others.
The rule that closes this off entirely is the department's own: never agree to move money for someone you have never met in person, whatever the story.
Victims are frequently contacted again, sometimes months later, by someone offering to recover the lost funds — a lawyer, an investigator, an official from an agency handling restitution. There is a fee.
This is the same fraud with a different cover story, and it selects deliberately for people already known to pay. If someone approaches you unsolicited offering to recover money you lost, treat it as stage one of a fresh cycle.
Because it is cheap, and because it only has to work occasionally. Contact costs approximately nothing, so the operation runs at a profit on a vanishingly small hit rate. That is also why the volumes are so large: the FTC's own reporting data puts prize, sweepstakes and lottery fraud among the ten most-reported fraud categories in the United States.
It also explains the targeting. Mega Millions notes these scams "often target older people and have been known to wipe out victims' retirement savings." And publicity makes a target of anyone: a named winner is a publicly identified holder of a large, recently acquired sum, which is one practical argument for claiming anonymously where your jurisdiction allows it.
The detailed version of the first check is ten red flags in a lottery win notification. If you have already been drawn in, what to do if you have been targeted has the reporting routes by country — and reporting is worth doing even when the money is gone, because aggregated reports are what regulators and platforms act on.
Last verified: 2026-08-29