Lottery scams

The money only goes one way

I spent my working life on the side of the counter where money changes hands, and every honest gambling business I know of works the same way about winners. You come to it with the ticket. It checks the ticket. It pays you. It never chases you down with good news, and it never asks for anything first.

Every lottery scam turns that around. The message comes to you, you're told you've won, and something has to be paid or handed over before the prize can be released. The lotteries themselves say it as plainly as I would. The Powerball FAQ says lotteries "will never ask you to pay a fee to collect a Powerball prize", and Mega Millions puts it this way: "If you are asked to pay any kind of fee to collect your winnings, you haven't won." The Federal Trade Commission is shorter still: "If you have to pay to get your prize, it's a scam."

The fee comes dressed up. It's taxes, or a processing charge, or insurance, or customs on the prize check. None of that is how taxes on a real prize work, either: the lottery takes the federal withholding out of the prize itself, as the lottery taxes page explains. You never send money ahead.

How they reach you

A call, a text, an email, a letter, a message on social media. Powerball says lotteries "will never contact you via email or telephone call to inform you that you've won a prize" unless you entered one of their own promotions, and that they don't contact winners through Facebook. Mega Millions goes further: no representative of the game "would ever call, text, or e-mail anyone about winning a prize."

So the contact is itself the warning. If the first you hear of a win is someone telling you, I'd treat it as a scam until it's proved otherwise, and I can't think of how a message like that could prove it.

The signs

The scams change their clothes every year, but the same few signs keep turning up in the official warnings.

• You never bought a ticket. Mega Millions: "You can't win a legitimate lottery if you didn't buy a ticket."
• It's a foreign or "international" lottery. Mega Millions is played only in the United States, and the FTC says messages about a foreign lottery "are almost certainly from a scammer".
• You're asked to pay by wire transfer, gift card, cryptocurrency or cash, the methods the FTC names.
• You're told to keep the win to yourself. Mega Millions says to be suspicious of that.
• You're given a number to call to "verify" the prize. That number may be part of the scam.
• Someone says they're from the government. The FTC: "the government won't call you demanding money to collect a prize."
• There's a "special drawing" on social media using a real game's logo. Mega Millions warned about exactly that in December 2025.

Bad spelling and a foreign area code on the caller ID are on Mega Millions' list too, though a careful scammer can fix both.

The check that bounces later

One version sends you money first, a check for part of the prize, and asks you to wire back the fees out of it. It looks safe because the money is already in your account. The FTC explains why it isn't: "If you deposit the check, it can take the bank weeks to figure out it's fake." By then you've sent real money, and once the bank finds the check is fake, in the FTC's words, "they'll want you to pay back the funds."

I'd treat any stranger's check that comes with a request to send some of it back as a fake, every time. No legitimate payer works that way.

Systems for sale

There's a quieter scam that never claims you've won. It sells you a way to win: a number system, a software package, a "pattern" in past draws. The FTC's line on that: "It's illegal for someone to ask you to pay to increase your odds of winning."

The arithmetic agrees. In Powerball every one of the 292,201,338 combinations has exactly the same chance in every drawing, and the balls don't remember last week. Nothing anyone sells you changes that. The only way to raise your chance is to buy more combinations, and the lottery odds page shows what that costs.

If one reaches you

Don't pay, don't call the number they gave you, and don't give out your bank details or Social Security number. If you think you might really have won something, go to the lottery yourself, through the website or number you find on your own: the Powerball, Mega Millions or your state lottery's site.

Then report it. The FTC takes reports at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and it also points people to their state attorney general and local consumer protection office. If you've already sent money, the FTC's advice is that "the sooner you act, the better", and I'd start with whoever moved the money for you, the bank, the wire service or the gift card company.

People are taken in by these because they're hopeful, not because they're foolish. If someone you know is spending more on the lottery than they can afford, or chasing a win that someone promised them, the responsible gambling page has where to get help. A real win starts with a ticket in your hand.