Got a mail from Nationwide Bank to pay activation fee for winning Yahoo'mail lottery is this a scam?

I'm sorry to tell you that the e-mail you received is an Advance Fee Fraud (419) scam. The scammer is trying to convince you to wire him money in order to claim a lottery prize that does not really exist. The message sounds too good to be true because it is.

You can visit http://scamwarners.com for great information about the fake lottery and other, similar scams. But basically, here is what happens:

The scammer harvests e-mail addresses from all over the Internet and bombards them with various "You've won the lotto!" messages. Sometimes the scammer pretends to be with a legitimate lottery, like the Texas State Lottery or the UK Lottery. Other times, a company like Yahoo!, Toyota, MSN, et cetera, will be named as the lottery promoter. And there are times when the scammers will simply make up something that is complete nonsense, like the World Cup Lottery.

You reply, thinking that you are about to be very rich. At this point, the scammer knows that he has a decent chance of extracting money from you. So he continues with the scam.

Many scammers will tell you that you need to wire them money to cover "courier fees." When you do this, the scammer will come back soon to ask for more money. This will continue until you are either broke or wise to the scam.

Some scammers will even go so far as to provide you with documents as "proof" that they are trustworthy. You might receive a scanned copy of a passport as identification. This is either fake or stolen. Seeing an ID proves nothing. And anybody with MS Paint and five minutes of free time can forge confirmation papers, lists of winners, or other such documents to convince victims that the lottery winnings are real. The scammers will try to make their cons look as genuine as possible so that you will fall for the scam.

You can confirm that you've received a scam e-mail by doing one or more of these things:

* Open the company's official Web site in a fresh browser window. Yahoo!, MSN, et cetera will not have any information on their Web sites about their lottery drawings or giveaways. This is because these companies are not really giving away money. At the most, you might find a fraud warning on these official Web sites. This is an excellent indication that you're being scammed, as companies that *are* giving away money will promote this fact all over the place.

* Copy part of the e-mail and paste that into a search engine. Many known scam e-mails are collected and published at various anti-scam Web sites. These pages are there to help spread the word about these scams so that fewer people will fall for them. Use these free tools to your advantage: search parts of any suspicious e-mail you receive before you reply.

* Contact your local law-enforcement department. More often than not, somebody there is familiar enough with this widespread scam to confirm that it is not real.

You should delete the scam e-mail and forget about it. If you have not actually lost money to the scammer, you do not have a case for law enforcement to investigate. They're busy trying to catch the scammers who have stolen from actual victims. Reporting the scammer's e-mail account to the provider to have the box closed might seem like a good idea, but this can ruin an active law-enforcement investigation.

You can also warn people you know about these scams. The more people we all tell, the fewer potential victims these low-life scammers will have.

Of course it is how can you win a lottery you never entered?

That would be like me winning the Lotto 649 without buying a ticket it just doesnt happen.

anything that say's uk in it is a scam. IF you never entered it u never won it. They want your money and it is one of the biggest scams so tell ur friends why your addit

Scam-ignore it. They may send you another notice, which you should also ignore, or give it to Scotland Yard.

not another one. any mail asking for fees of any description is trying to get money from you not giving it.

You can bet your life it is a big scam.

...Big scam!I get 3-4 emails a month re; winnings,lotteries etc....