“Google Anniversary Winning Notification”; Advance Fee Scam

The email is not from Larry Page or anyone else at Google and you have not won any money. It is a scam designed to trick you into sending your money and personal information to online criminals.

According to this email, which claims to be direct from Google’s Larry Page, your email address has been selected as the winner of £1,950,000 in the Google Anniversary promotion for 2016. Supposedly, the company runs the annual promotion to “encourage the

active users of the Google search engine and the Google ancillary services”.

To claim your unexpected windfall, you are instructed to send some initial personal information to the Claims Administrator via email. The message notes that you are “hereby strongly advised” to keep the win strictly confidential until after you claim your prize.

But, alas, the email is not from Larry Page or anybody else at Google. And, you have not won even a penny, let alone £1,950,000. In fact, the email is a typical advance fee scam designed to trick you into sending your money and your personal and financial information to cybercriminals.

If you fall for the ruse and contact the “Claims Administrator”, you will soon be told that you must send money in advance to cover various – entirely imaginary – fees that supposedly must be paid before your prize claim can be processed. For example, the scammer may claim that there are legal and banking costs that must be paid up front. Or, he or she may claim that a tax obligation must be met before the prize money can be sent to you. And, the scammer will insist that, because of legal restrictions, the required fees cannot be taken out of the prize itself and must be paid in advance. You will be told that, if you don’t send money to cover the fees, you will forfeit your claim to the prize and it will be given to someone else.

If you do send money, the scammer will then ask you to send even more money to cover other “unexpected” costs supposedly incurred during the claims process. Requests for more and more money will continue until you belatedly realise that you are being scammed or simply run out of money to send. At that point, the scammer will simply disappear with your money. And, of course, given that the prize never existed to begin with, the promised “winning cheque” will never arrive.

To make matters worse, you may also become a victim of identity theft. During the course of the scam, the criminal may have been able to trick you into providing a large amount of your personal and financial information, ostensibly to prove your identity and allow the allocation of your prize money. The criminal can then either sell your information to other identity thieves or use it to steal your identity.

By advising recipients not to tell others about their supposed win, the scammer lessens the likelihood that a more astute friend of the victims will warn them that a scam is afoot.

Advance fee scams like this one are very common and very old. In fact, they predate the Internet by many years. Nevertheless, they still gain new victims every day.

Be wary of any message in any format that claims that you have won a large sum of money in a lottery or promotion that you have never even entered.