Any time an old Fraud Prevention Unit article sees a spike in traffic, that means an old scam, usually of the emailed variety and often of the lottery scam variety, has resurfaced. Due to a recent jump in traffic, it seems the old British Telecoms Lottery scam is out there making the rounds again.

I first wrote about this scam in early 2011. I’m not sure if the new version is the same or slightly altered, but here is the text of the one I got back then:

From: [redacted]@web.de
To: winners@btlottery.com
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2011 4:42 AM
Subject: Confirmed Today And Must Be Claimed Immediately

BRITISH TELECOMS PROMOTION DEPARTMENT.

The sum of $1 Million USD has been awarded to you by the BRITISH TELECOMS LOTTERY, Fill the form below for more details and E-MAIL: TO ([redacted]@gmail.com),

1. YOUR FULL NAME:
2. YOUR FULL ADDRESS:
3. YOUR MOBILE PHONE NUMBER:
4. YOUR AGE:
5. CURRENT OCCUPATION:

Yours Faithfully,
BRITISH TELECOMS PROMOTION DEPARTMENT.

There are so many things that don’t make sense here. If you had really won such a major award, why would you need to tell them your name? Why would a British company hand out such large amounts of money to random people who aren’t even British? Wouldn’t the prize be in GPB, not USD? Why would the message have been sent from a .de (Germany) domain? Why would the contact person be using a Gmail account rather than an official British Telecoms email address?

Regardless of the details, or whether the recent examples use this old text verbatim or if alterations have been made, the result would be the same: someone would ask you to wire a large amount of cash out of the country to cover “taxes” or “fees,” and then disappear. There really isn’t much that’s new when it comes to lottery scams.