Gareth & Catherine Bull Advance Fee Lottery Scam

This story was first published on July 26, 2013.

Outline

Emails purporting to be from UK lottery winners Gareth & Catherine Bull claim that the couple has decided to give several million pounds to randomly selected people as part of a charity project.

Brief Analysis

Gareth & Catherine Bull really did win a large lottery prize in 2012. However, they did not send the email and they are not randomly handing out millions of pounds to strangers. The email is an advance fee scam designed to trick recipients into sending money and personal information to Internet criminals.

Examples

Detailed Analysis

These emails claims to be from UK couple Gareth & Catherine Bull, who won almost £41 million in the EuroMillions jackpot drawn in January 2012. According to the message, the couple have decided to give several million pounds to people randomly selected via their email addresses. And, supposedly, the lucky recipient of the email is one of those chosen.

The recipient is urged to contact the couple via email to arrange transfer of the money.

Those who fall for the trick and reply to the email with the requested details will not be conversing with Gareth and Catherine. Instead, they will be talking to online criminals intent on stealing their money and personal information.

Those who reply will soon receive requests for various fees supposedly required to cover banking and transfer costs, insurance payments or tax. The scammers, still pretending to be Gareth and Catherine, will insist that these fees must be paid before the £1.5 million can be transferred. Requests for further fees may continue until victims run out of money or finally wise up to the scam.

Of course, the scammers will keep all of the money sent and victims will never receive so much as a penny of the promised windfall. And, if they have been tricked into supplying sensitive personal and financial information during the scam, they may also become victims of identity theft.

Advance fee scammers often use the names and details of real lottery winners in their fraudulent emails as a means of making their claims seem more believable. Advance fee criminals have also used the names of previous UK EuroMillions winners Adrian and Gillian Bayford. And scammers have similarly exploited the names of Canadian lottery winners Violet and Allen Large.

Some lottery winners may indeed give away part of their winnings to help others. But, it is extremely unlikely that any winner would decide to randomly distribute large sums of money to total strangers via unsolicited emails. Any message that makes such a claim should be treated as highly suspect.