OT: I Have Won!!!

[Gandalf Parker]

Atrocities said:

Oh man, those kind of scams are far harder to detect and a lot easier to fall for. If not for the fact that I did not have an account with Washington Mutual, I too may have fell for a simular scam.

I guess the crux of the situation would be to consider every email suspect until proven lagit.

I hope your co-worker was able to change everything before they could act upon the information they were deceived into providing.

Whenever a thread breaks out about how to tell if its real or not I tell people DONT TRY TO TELL. Yes I can still read the headers and spot the falsehood in it because I fairly well know http protocol. But they do get harder and harder to spot. So my stance is NEVER click an email link for things like that. Always go manually to the site and look for the link you need.

For that matter conisder it for phone calls also. You should have a rule that you never give ANY personal information to anyone who calls you. You should manually look up the number and call the company.

[Sivran]

You fool, you passed up a chance at riches!

[narf poit chez BOOM]

All lottories are scams. X number of people pay Z amount of money and one person gets Z/2.

[Atrocities]

Ever wonder what they mean by "validating" the numbers? What they mean by that is that they already know what numbers are going to win, via a computer generated algorythm designed to drive up the amount of money people pay each week to win the jack pot. (IE if you win a million dollar Jackpot every week less and less people are going to play. But if the jack pot is 11 million, well then people feel lucky and buy more tickets.)

The numbers do not change after they have been chosen. Knownone othe than the Lottory offical knows the number that is going to win before the balls are dropped. The balls are weighted in such a way that only the numbers that have been chosen will come up. They cannot, or at least could not, determine the way the chosen balls would be chosen, but they knew which balls would be chosen over all.

When they validate the numbers, they are doing two things, one verifying that the balls have not been tampered with, and verifying that the number the computer chose to win was the number that came up.

Now on rare occations the computer has determined that the number it chose had already be bought so they changed the number to drive up the jack pot.

Lottery winers do not get all the money at one time. The state keeps the money and draws interest off the money. The lottery winner does not get interest on the money they have won. In fact, they pay a higher tax rate on the money than someone like bill gates would pay on an equal amount. It really is a sick industry that we are talking about here.

It may pay to win the lottery but it never pays what you win.