I got an e-mail saying I won the British National Lottery, is it for real, or is it a scam?

I can answer this question for you fine. Do not send these people any money or personal information! You can be 100% sure that you haven't won anything right now and here's an explanation of exactly what the notice you've recieved is intended to do.

If you are already a victim contact the U.S. Secret Service via email. This address will be provided toward the end of this answer!

I would laugh at the proposed scam and surely not respond to the punks responsible.

There are many Nigerian scams that are showing up nowadays. Please read the following carefully:

I can guarantee you that if you listen to these punks you will lose every bit of money you have and never receive any prize money as such a prize does not exist.

Another new popular scam is the lottery scam:

There is no British National Lottery Award, Overseas Lottery International, YAHOO & MSN Lotteries, Yahoo online dept., UK (United Kingdom) Lottery, Netherlands Lottery, British Lottery, Thunderball Online Lottery in the UK, Australian Lottery, Spanish Lottery, UK/FRANCO/GERMANY Lottery, Yahoo Lottery Microsoft Lottery (emmulating from the UK or anywhere else) or any other form of lottery you can win without buying a ticket. While some people might only copy and paste such email to their answer with a brief take on it, I will go into detail because I'm tired of this trash, as several of my friends have lost their a$$es to this scam. This is about as far away from legitimate as anything can get, whether it be a contest, promotion, or whatever. The Euro Asian whatever you talk about is a perfect example of how you can hand your lifesavings over to some fat-sweaty nigerian con-man (and your i.d. too).

There exists a certain form of immoral degenerate that trolls the internet searching for suckers who believe that they have gotten very lucky and won a lottery which they have never entered. They will probably entice you to send an advance fee to claim your non-existant winnings and if you do send this money, you can kiss it goodbye. The money will likely be en-route to Nigeria, a cesspool of fraud that has been the center of these types of fraud over the last few decades.

The best thing to do is to delete such emails immediately and to never reply to them. If you even reply, you risk having your email inbox flooded. If you call these people, expect to be harrassed over the phone at all hours of the night! In some cases, people who travel to claim their winnings in Nigeria are taken hostage, and in worse-case scenarios are killed when whoever is paying ransom payments exhausts their money supply. If anything online sounds to good to be true it always is buddy.

By the way, I have kind of become an anti-scam activists due to the fact that I have many friends who have had their identities and life savings stolen from them via these methods.

This is simply advance fee fraud (a prevalent type of fraud which continously asks for money to cover unforseen expenses) and is intended to drain your bank account, promising money that simply does not exist. Hopefully, this answers your question.

If you have any more questions, do a yahoo search on lottery scams, nigeria 419 scams, internet fraud, or advance fee fraud. You can also read more about this at www.secretservice.gov and www.419eater.com!

If you have lost money you should report it to the U.S. Secret Service at www.secretservice.gov

Now you know the basics of Advance Fee Fraud, a multi-million dollar industry that costs honest people their life savings everyday. Be happy you weren't duped by this scam!