Letters promising money are usually too good to be true
QI KEEP receiving letters through the post promising if I send £10, I shall win a lottery – one suggests over £10 million.
The envelopes are covered with phrases such as “Open Immediately”, “Time Critical” and “Privileged information for the addressee only”. The contents are all very well printed. Some contain a cheque, made out to me at my home address, for up to £150,000. And even more often, the word “guarantee” appears all over the place.
I am a pensioner so I am old enough not to be believe in the tooth fairy. But I am sure that many people must fall for this.
What is this all about? And why is it allowed? Claudia A
AOBVIOUSLY from your letter, you do not intend responding. Good. You would only be wasting your money.
But you are not alone. Millions of similar letters to those you describe are received each year in the UK, mainly by older people in a scheme that has now been around for some 20 years. Royal Mail continues to deliver them because the contents are sealed in an envelope and the post cannot open these.
In any case, they are so written as to be legal.
The big print says “due to fantastic recent events, Claudia is in an exclusive group of just five players, her name now written next to 20 million Australian dollars!” The “fantastic events” appear to be a computer “automatically assessing your profile and including you in a select list”.
It then urges you to “enter now and you could be sitting on the cash, not just next to it!”
But the small print makes it clear that what you get for the £10 you are asked to send in is “five group play” chances to win an Australian lottery.
It seems that you would be joined with all the other respondents and end up with a very small share in five tickets as a member of a syndicate. And five tickets in a big lottery won’t get you far.
This letter and those like it are all nonsense, designed to be convincing and to separate you from your money. And if you reply, you will probably end up getting many more of these letters – not just from Australia but from Canada, the Philippines, Belgium and elsewhere.