EuroMillion Lottery Scams

We have covered EuroMillions since 2005, and scam emails using the EuroMillions name have been circulating for almost that entire time. The wording changes. The mechanics never do.

The one rule that catches almost everything

Real lotteries are draws against tickets that were bought. There is no entry you were unknowingly placed in, no “email ballot”, no promotional draw that selected your address from a database. The UK National Lottery states it plainly: it will never ask you for money to release a prize, and it does not put winning amounts in emails at all.

So before you read another word of any message telling you that you have won:

• Did you buy a ticket for this specific draw? If no, it is a scam. Stop there.
• Are you being asked to pay anything at all? Fees, taxes, legal costs, courier charges, “insurance” on the transfer. No legitimate lottery deducts money from you before paying out. Tax, where it applies, is handled after the money reaches you — never as a precondition.
• Are you being asked to keep it quiet? This is the tell that gives the game away. Scammers ask for secrecy because the first person you tell will say “that’s a scam”. Genuine operators have no interest in your silence.

How the scam actually works

Lottery fraud is a form of advance-fee fraud: you are promised a large sum, then asked for a small one to unlock it. The structure is consistent across every variant.

1. The approach. Unsolicited contact — email, letter, text, WhatsApp, a phone call, or a message on Facebook. It names a real lottery or a plausible fake one, and it usually includes a reference number to look official.
2. The hook. A figure large enough to be exciting but not so large as to be absurd. Often between £500,000 and £2m. You are asked to confirm your details to “process” the claim.
3. The first fee. Small relative to the prize — a few hundred pounds for processing, courier fees, or a “release tax”. This is the moment the scam earns money.
4. The escalation. There is always a complication. A bank compliance hold, an unexpected duty, a transfer that failed. Each one needs another payment. Victims who pay once are worked for months.
5. The recovery scam. Months later a second approach arrives — a “lawyer”, “recovery agency” or “regulator” offering to get your money back, for a fee. It is the same scam, run again.

The reason step three works is that the fee is small and the prize is large, and the arithmetic feels sensible. That is the trap: the fee is not an investment in a prize, because the prize does not exist.

Stage five catches people who believe they are past the worst of it. UK police guidance is explicit that a recovery approach is simply a second scam run against the same victim — frequently by the same people, working from a list of those already known to pay.

Online lottery scams

Advance-fee emails

The oldest and still the most common. The message claims your email address was selected in an international draw. UK police guidance notes that Spanish, Canadian and Australian lotteries are among the most frequently impersonated, alongside EuroMillions and the UK National Lottery.

Modern versions are far better written than the clumsy examples people remember from the 2000s. Do not rely on spelling mistakes as your filter — machine translation has removed that tell. Rely on the rules above instead.

Check the sending address, not the display name. Anyone can set a display name to “The National Lottery”. The National Lottery publishes the specific addresses it emails from — including admin@national-lottery.co.uk and player@national-lottery.co.uk. Anything from a Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo address, or from a domain that merely contains the words “national lottery”, is fraudulent.

What one actually looks like

This arrived in my inbox in 2015. I have reproduced it exactly as it was sent, including the line breaks and the errors:

We are still waiting for you to collect your funds $1.000000 because your Your Payment Information have been release to you so that you can be able to collect your funds as soon as possible.

We want to inform you that you need to contact the LOTTO PAYMENT OFFICE through our email address:(claiming-office@lycos.com)to able us send your Payment Information to you and collect your funds within the next 48hrs time.

Congratulations once again been part of 2015 West Africa United Nation open E-mail ballot system choseen award.

Read it for its structure, not its spelling. Every element of the modern version is already present here: a prize you never entered for, a borrowed institutional name to supply authority, a free webmail address standing in for a claims department, a 48-hour deadline, and a request to make contact so the real ask — the fee — can be made at the next step.

Strip out the broken English and that skeleton is exactly what lands in inboxes today, written in fluent, plausible prose. The tells that people remember from the 2000s have gone; the machinery underneath has not changed at all. If you find yourself thinking this one is far too well written to be a scam, you are applying the wrong test — go back to the rule at the top of this page instead: if you did not buy a ticket, you did not win.

One detail worth noticing: the amount is written as $1.000000. Not a typo on my part — that is how it was sent. Real prize correspondence from a real operator does not get the amount wrong.

Phishing for your real lottery account

A newer and more dangerous variant: instead of inventing a prize, the message claims there is a problem with your genuine account, or that you have a small unclaimed prize waiting. The link goes to a convincing replica of the operator’s login page, and it harvests your real credentials.

The defence is simple and absolute: never reach your lottery account through a link in an email. Type the address into your browser yourself. The National Lottery’s own guidance says the same thing — genuine prizes can always be claimed from inside your account, and you never need to click an emailed link to do it.

Social media, WhatsApp and Telegram

Scammers clone the accounts of real lottery winners who have appeared in the press, then message people claiming to be giving away part of their windfall to strangers. It is emotionally clever — it borrows the credibility of a genuine, verifiable news story.

Real winners do not run giveaways through direct messages, and a genuine philanthropic gift never requires the recipient to pay a fee first.

Fake ticket-buying sites

Sites that take your money for a EuroMillions ticket that is never bought. Some are outright theft; others are unlicensed operators that may pay out small prizes while being wholly unable to honour a large one.

Before you buy through any site that is not your own country’s official operator, check it holds a licence. In Britain, the Gambling Commission’s public register lists every licensed business, and you can search it by company or trading name in under a minute. A licence claimed in a website footer means nothing until you have found it on the regulator’s own register.

Our guide to official lottery sites covers which routes are legitimate in each EuroMillions country, and the difference between buying a real ticket, using a concierge service and placing a bet on the outcome — three different products that are often deliberately blurred.

“Prediction systems” and AI lottery apps

A growing category promises software, an algorithm or an “AI loophole” that improves your odds. These are sold as products rather than presented as prizes, which makes them feel less like fraud.

EuroMillions draws are independent random events. Past results carry no information about future ones. Our hot and cold numbers page exists because the statistics are interesting, not because they predict anything — and anyone selling you a system that claims otherwise is selling you nothing.

Offline lottery scams

Online fraud gets the attention, but the offline versions persist because they reach people who are cautious about email and trusting of paper and telephone calls.

Postal letters

Printed letters on convincing letterhead, sometimes with a cheque enclosed. They typically ask you to telephone a “claims agent”. The paper itself does the persuading — something physical feels more official than an email, particularly to older recipients.

Telephone calls

A caller congratulates you and walks you through a claims process. Phone scams are effective because they are interactive: an experienced fraudster can handle your objections in real time in a way an email cannot, and can apply pressure that a letter cannot.

Caller ID is not evidence. Numbers are trivially spoofed, including to display a genuine organisation’s number. If you want to check whether a call was real, hang up, wait five minutes, and dial the number from the operator’s official website yourself.

Fake cheques

You receive a genuine-looking cheque as “partial advance” on your winnings, and are asked to bank it and forward a portion to cover fees. The cheque clears initially, then bounces days or weeks later. You are liable for the full amount, and the money you forwarded is gone.

This exploits a genuine misunderstanding about banking: money appearing in your balance does not mean a cheque has cleared irrevocably.

Doorstep and in-person approaches

Less common but more aggressive. Someone arrives claiming to represent a lottery or prize company, often with paperwork and identification. Legitimate lottery operators do not send people to your home to collect fees or verify wins.

Ticket and scratchcard fraud at the counter

An offline risk that does not involve a fake prize at all. A retailer checks your ticket, tells you it is not a winner, and keeps it. This is why the advice to sign the back of your ticket as soon as you buy it matters — an unsigned bearer instrument belongs to whoever holds it.

Check your own numbers before you hand anything over. Our ticket checker takes a few seconds, and knowing the answer before you reach the counter removes the opportunity entirely.

There is a second version of this that is much harder to notice, and it has produced the biggest cases. Instead of telling you the ticket lost, the person behind the counter tells you it won something small — and pays you that. You leave having won. Nothing prompts you to check, because you were handed money.

What it looks like in practice

In Kent in 2013, a syndicate organiser handed over a batch of tickets to be checked and was told one had won £10. It had won £79,000. The shop worker was convicted, and the judge called the offence opportunistic — which is what it usually is. This is rarely planned. It is a decision made in the few seconds between a terminal displaying a number and a customer looking up.

The largest case ran in Syracuse, New York. In October 2006 a maintenance worker bought a scratchcard, was told it had won $5,000, and was paid $4,000 for it. It was worth $5 million. The store owner’s son then held it for roughly six years before attempting to claim, close to the end of the claim window — the delay being the point, because a prize nobody has claimed is a prize nobody is looking for. He was sentenced in 2013 to eight and a third to twenty-five years.

A second New York case adds a detail worth bracing for. A player who won $1 million on a scratchcard was told it was worth $1,000 and paid that. When he came back the next day and said he was suspicious, he was offered $10,000 to keep it out of the police station. He declined. The store owner and his son were charged with grand larceny and lost the right to sell lottery tickets at all. If you ever raise a doubt and are offered money to drop it, that is not a goodwill gesture — it is a confession, and it is the moment to stop talking and start reporting.

It happens in Britain too

This is not an American problem. UK convictions run along exactly the same lines, including on EuroMillions itself:

• Oldham, 2012 — £1 million, EuroMillions. A newsagent told a customer her ticket had won nothing, then claimed the million-pound prize himself. He was jailed for 30 months.
• Norfolk, 2011 — £156,000. A shopkeeper and her husband kept a winning ticket. Both were jailed, for 14 months.
• Gravesend — £80,000. A newsagent claimed a customer’s prize and received a non-custodial sentence.

What actually catches them

The operator’s verification, at the point of claim. Draw-game tickets carry a trail: a claim can be checked against where and when the ticket was bought, and a story that does not match the record collapses. In the Oldham case that is precisely what happened — the shopkeeper said he had bought the ticket at his own shop, and it was traced to a supermarket and to the woman who actually bought it.

Two honest qualifications, though.

The first is that scratchcards are weaker. Much of that traceability comes from a draw entry being tied to a terminal, a time and a draw. An instant-win card handed across a counter leaves far less of a trail, which is why both of the biggest underpayment cases above involve scratchcards rather than draw tickets.

The second is about timing. Detection happens when the fraudster claims, not while you are standing at the counter being handed four thousand dollars — and in between sits however long they choose to wait. The Syracuse winner was confirmed and paid in the end. It took seven years. The system worked; it did not work quickly, and it did not protect him in the moment.

How to remove the opportunity entirely

• Know the answer before you hand anything over. This single habit defeats both versions. Check the numbers yourself — on the operator’s app, on our results pages, or with our ticket checker — and the person behind the counter is confirming something you already know rather than telling you something you don’t.
• Sign the back as soon as you buy it. An unsigned ticket is a bearer instrument: it belongs to whoever is holding it. A signed one belongs to you.
• Treat scratchcards with more care, not less. They are the weakest link in the verification chain, and they are exactly where the large underpayment frauds have happened.
• Be alert to a small win you were not expecting. Counter-intuitive, but it is the whole mechanic. If you are told a ticket won a modest amount and you had not checked, check afterwards anyway.
• Keep the ticket. In every case above the physical ticket changed hands and did not come back.
• Playing online removes the step completely. An online entry is registered to your account and wins are credited automatically — no counter, no human discretion, nothing to hand over. That is a structural advantage rather than a matter of trusting anyone.

Nobody convicted in the cases above is named here. All are matters of public record, but naming individuals in a consumer guide years after the fact does nothing for the reader — the method is the point, not the person.

Syndicate fraud

Workplace and social syndicates are perfectly legitimate and extremely common, but informal ones go wrong in predictable ways — disputed shares, tickets nobody can produce, an organiser who claims a win was theirs personally.

A written syndicate agreement naming every member and their share, agreed before any win, prevents almost all of it. Our syndicates guide covers how to set one up properly.

How real EuroMillions wins actually work

Knowing the genuine process is the most reliable defence, because it makes the fake version obvious.

You must hold a ticket. Either a physical ticket bought from a licensed retailer, or an entry recorded in your account with your country’s official operator. There is no third category.

You find out by checking, not by being told. For online entries, the operator emails to say there is news about your account and invites you to log in — without stating an amount. For retail tickets, you check the published results yourself. Nobody telephones you out of the blue to announce a win.

Nothing is deducted before payment. EuroMillions prizes are paid according to each country’s rules. In the UK and Ireland, prizes are paid tax-free. In other participating countries, tax may apply, but it is handled by the operator or the tax authority after payment — never collected from you in advance by someone asking for a transfer.

Large prizes are claimed in person or through a formal process. Above a certain threshold you will be asked to attend an appointment or complete a verified claim with the operator directly. This is a slow, documented procedure involving the organisation you actually bought your ticket from.

Red flags, in order of reliability

• You did not buy a ticket. Conclusive on its own.
• Any request for payment. Fees, taxes, courier, legal, insurance — all fictitious.
• A request for secrecy. No legitimate operator asks this.
• Pressure to act quickly. Deadlines exist to stop you thinking or asking someone.
• Payment by transfer, gift card, cryptocurrency or money-transfer service. These are chosen because they are irreversible.
• A free email address, or a domain that merely contains the operator’s name.
• Requests for identity documents early in the process. Passport and bank details collected before any verified claim exists are being collected for identity theft.
• The amount is stated in the first message. Real operators do not do this by email.

Verify any claim in five minutes

1. Check whether you actually entered. Log into your account by typing the address yourself, or find the physical ticket.
2. Check the draw. Compare against the published results for that date on a source you navigated to independently.
3. Check the sender. Read the full email address, not the display name.
4. Check the licence. If a company is involved, search the Gambling Commission register, or your national regulator’s equivalent.
5. Contact the operator directly. Using a number or address from their official website — never one supplied in the message.

If you have already paid

Act quickly, and do not be embarrassed into delay. These frauds are designed by professionals to work on careful people.

1. Stop all contact immediately. UK police guidance is direct about this: break the contact, do not reply, do not click links, do not call numbers, make no further payments. Do not send “one last” payment to recover what you have already sent.
2. Call your bank now. Use the number on your card. Recent transfers can sometimes be recalled. Under UK reimbursement rules, many authorised push payment fraud victims are entitled to be reimbursed — ask specifically about this.
3. Report it. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland this now goes to Report Fraud, which replaced Action Fraud in December 2025: reportfraud.police.uk or 0300 123 2040. In Scotland, report to Police Scotland on 101. Note that some official pages, including the National Lottery’s own security page, still refer to Action Fraud — the phone number is unchanged.
4. Protect your identity. If you sent copies of documents, monitor your credit file and consider protective registration with Cifas.
5. Expect the second approach. Anyone who contacts you offering to recover your money for a fee is running the recovery scam. Legitimate recovery happens through your bank and the police, and never requires an upfront payment.

Where to report, by country

Always report, even when the money is unrecoverable. Reports are what let police link cases together and identify networks, and a single report rarely shows a pattern that hundreds of them make obvious.

The scale of the problem

• £1.28bnLost to fraud in the UK in 2025
• 4.06mConfirmed cases — a record, up 11%
• +65%Rise in advance-fee fraud losses, to £58.4m
• 66%Of authorised push payment cases begin online

Those are UK Finance’s figures for 2025, published in its 2026 annual fraud report. Advance-fee fraud — the category lottery scams belong to — was the fastest-rising type in the set.

The Federal Trade Commission reports that older adults in the United States are significantly more likely than younger adults to lose money specifically to prize, sweepstakes and lottery scams — which is why this page is worth sharing with an older relative even if it tells you nothing new.

Who they target, and why it keeps working

Lottery fraud is not scattered at random. It is aimed, and it is aimed at older people — which matters if you are reading this about a parent rather than about yourself.

The US Federal Trade Commission’s most recent report to Congress puts fraud losses reported by adults aged 60 and over at $2.4 billion in 2024, up roughly fourfold from about $600 million in 2020. Across all fraud types the disparity is starkest at the top of the age range: among people aged 80 and over, the median reported loss exceeded $1,600. Prize, sweepstakes and lottery scams are one of the categories where older adults are hit hardest relative to younger ones.

The industrial version

The largest organised operation targeting English-speaking victims runs out of Jamaica, and has done for well over a decade. It is telephone-based rather than email-based, which is precisely what makes it effective: a practised caller can answer objections in real time, build a relationship across weeks, and apply pressure that no email can.

The pattern in the prosecutions is consistent. Victims are told they have won a substantial lottery prize. They are then asked for a sequence of payments — taxes, customs fees, insurance, a courier charge — each one framed as the last obstacle before the money arrives. In a case sentenced in May 2026, a Jamaican national received four and a half years in US federal prison for a conspiracy that ran from 2021 to 2023 doing exactly this to elderly Americans.

One detail from that case deserves separate attention: the conspiracy used bank accounts opened in the victims’ own names to move the proceeds. Victims were not only defrauded, they were used as unwitting money mules — which can leave someone facing questions from their own bank about transactions they did not understand they were facilitating. If an older relative has been drawn into one of these and has been asked to receive and forward money for someone else, that is a bank conversation to have immediately rather than a thing to feel embarrassed about.

Why it rarely stops at one approach

This is the part people do not expect, and the reason a single loss so often turns into several.

Anyone who responds to a scam approach — even by replying to say no, even by simply taking the call — is recorded as responsive, and that record has resale value. The lists are known in the trade as sucker lists, and they are bought and sold between operations precisely because someone who engaged once is judged likely to engage again. Repeatedly working the same victim has its own name: reloading.

So the volume goes up, not down, after the first contact. That matches what I have seen personally over twenty years of this site: the approaches never arrived singly, and they never stopped after being ignored.

The cruellest variant arrives afterwards. A second caller makes contact claiming to be from a police unit, a government agency or a recovery firm, and offers to get the lost money back — for a fee. That caller is frequently working from the same list, and sometimes for the same operation that took the money in the first place. Nobody legitimate charges an upfront fee to recover funds. If you have already paid something, the steps under If you have already paid further up this page are the route — your bank and Report Fraud, not a stranger who telephones offering to help.

If this is about someone else

• Do not lead with the word “scam.” People who suspect they have been caught often withdraw at the first sign of judgement, and the most useful thing — the full picture of what has been paid and to whom — is exactly what gets withheld.
• Ask about the post as well as the phone. Printed letters still work, and often work best on the people most at risk. A pile of prize correspondence is a reliable early signal.
• Check for new recurring payments, and for money arriving that then goes out again to someone else.
• Expect the calls to continue once the list exists. Call blocking and a mail preference registration do more good than any single conversation.
• Report it even when nothing was lost. Attempts are what build the intelligence picture that stops the next one.

Frequently asked questions

Can you win EuroMillions without buying a ticket?

No. EuroMillions is drawn against tickets purchased for a specific draw. There is no promotional draw, email ballot or database selection. Any message telling you otherwise is fraudulent.

Does the National Lottery email you if you win?

If you played online, it emails to tell you there is news about your account and asks you to log in. It does not state the prize amount in the email, and it never asks for payment. Log in by typing the address into your browser rather than clicking the link.

Do you pay tax on EuroMillions winnings?

In the UK and Ireland, lottery prizes are paid tax-free. Some other participating countries do tax prizes, but this is handled through the official operator after payment. Nobody legitimately asks you to pay tax in advance to release a prize.

Is a lottery win ever announced by phone?

Not as an unsolicited first contact. Operators may telephone during a claim you have already started, but a cold call announcing a win is a scam.

Can I get my money back after a lottery scam?

Sometimes. Contact your bank immediately — recent transfers can occasionally be recalled, and UK reimbursement rules cover many authorised push payment victims. Anyone who contacts you offering recovery for an upfront fee is running a second scam.

How do I check a lottery site is legitimate?

Search the regulator’s own register rather than trusting the site’s claims. In Britain that is the Gambling Commission’s public register of licensed businesses.

Sources

• Report Fraud — Lottery scams guidance
• City of London Police — Report Fraud service replaces Action Fraud
• The National Lottery — Security
• Gambling Commission — Register of gambling businesses
• UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026
• FTC — Protecting Older Consumers report
• US Department of Justice — Jamaican national sentenced over lottery scam targeting the elderly
• CBS News — 25-year sentence for stealing a $5m scratchcard
• NBC News — rightful winner paid seven years later
• Lottery fraud — documented retailer convictions

Last reviewed: 26 September 2026. We review this guide whenever reporting routes or scam tactics change.

This guide is general information, not legal or financial advice. If you have lost money, contact your bank and the police.