Gerry & Lisa Cannings “Charity Donations”; Advance Fee Scam

Gerry & Lisa Cannings really did win £32 million in a February 2016 UK Lotto jackpot. However, they are certainly not giving away large sums of money to total strangers via the Internet. And, they did not send this email. In fact, the email is an advance fee scam designed to trick you into sending your money and personal information to criminals.

According to this email, UK lottery winners Gerry & Lisa Cannings have decided to give you £250,000 as part of their charity donations. Supposedly, the couple is giving you and four other lucky email recipients £250,000 each based on random selections from a database of email addresses.

The email includes a link to a YouTube video featuring a news segment that discusses the couple’s win.

It asks you to send your information to “Gerry” via an AOL email address to claim your unexpected windfall.

Gerry & Lisa Cannings really did win £32.5 million in a February 2016 UK Lotto jackpot. However, they did not send this email and they are not going to give you £250,000. The claim that they are giving money to total strangers based on random selections from an email database is utter nonsense.

In fact, the email is an advance fee scam designed to trick you into sending your money and personal information to online criminals.

If you contact the criminals, who will continue to pose as Gerry & Lisa, they will claim that you will need to send money to cover various obligatory fees before your “donation” can be processed. They will insist that these fees must be paid in advance and cannot be deducted from the supposed £250,000 donation.

If you comply and send money, further requests for money will likely follow. When they have taken as much of your money as they can, the criminals will simply disappear. It is very unlikely that will see any of the money you sent ever again. Nor, of course, will you ever receive the promised £250,000, which the criminals never had to give you in the first place.

And, to make matters worse, during the course of the scam, the criminals may have managed to collect a lot of your personal and financial information. They may later use this information to steal your identity.

Advance fee scammers often use the names and details of real lottery winners as a means of making their stories sound more plausible. Be very wary of any email that claims that you have won or been awarded a large sum of money based on the random selection of your name or email address. Scams like this have been around for many years, but still continue to find new victims.

And, while lottery winners often do give portions of their winnings to charity, any claim that they have decided to give large sums of money to strangers they have randomly selected online is very likely to be a scam attempt.