A typical lottery scam start off with an email or letter saying that you are the luck winner of a lottery. Once you respond, then you are asked to send a small processing fee or an administrative fee to transfer the funds to your account. Then beings a long process, in which the lottery company requests you to provide your bank account and identity details. Once you provide all these and pay several other fees that the lottery company requests, you are sent a cheque, which is a fake. The fake lottery uses the name of a genuine lottery company as well. These companies also use your details to swindle others and the next thing you know since the fraud is committed in your name, you are being arrested and locked up in jail.

Here is a look at some of the characteristics these letter scams contain:-

- They use names of some of the famous lotteries: Famous lottery names such as the following are used to trick people, Bingo Loterij International, Blue Fountain Lottery International, Apple Lottery in the UK, Australian International Lottery program, Canadian Lottery program and Diamond International lottery are some of the names use by scammers.

- If you have not bought a lottery ticket, then you don't have to worry about it.

- You may not have bought a lottery ticket but you can still be a victim of a lottery scam. Scammers use the email lottery to pick you as a winner. So even if you have never purchased a lottery ticket in your life, you can still be eligible through email. Therefore, the notification you get will be along the lines of 'you are the 50th email winner of the email diamond lottery' and the good news go on to explain how you can claim your money.

- The spelling and the grammar is insane, half the time you don't understand what they want to say.

- Email asking for money to secure your winnings. Money is required for processing costs and administrative costs.

- The address and contact details of the lottery company is not consistent.

- The email address you get the email form is a yahoo or a g-mail account.

- If you're sent a letter there is no return address,only a toll free telephone number which could probably be a mobile number.

- The email is a generic email and is not really addressed to you. These emails are sent out as bulk emails. Therefore there is nothing personal about them.

- You are asked to respond immediately or the winnings will be given to someone else.

- The latest trends for scammers have been to use telephone calls and notify the winner via the telephone.

- There may be a request for you to travel to the country to collect your winnings. There are several people who have been scammed to travel to various countries to collect their winnings only to find out that they have been tricked.

- If you have been contacted on the telephone, you may get a telephone number to call back. But scammers never give the chance for you to call them they will keep calling you repeatedly.

Lottery scams are dangerous as sometime you or a family member can end up getting physically hurt.