Is an email saying I won a foreign lottery I never entered real?

Foreign lottery scam emails — often claiming to be from a Spanish El Gordo draw, a Dutch Postcode Lottery, or a UK National Lottery prize committee — inform you that your email address was randomly selected in a prize draw and you have won a large sum. To claim your prize, you must contact a claims agent and pay a fee for processing, tax clearance, or legal documentation. Each payment leads to a request for another. The prize never exists. No legitimate lottery selects winners by randomly drawing email addresses — you must purchase a ticket. If you receive such an email, mark it as spam and do not respond.

Beyond the obvious logical problem — you cannot win a draw you never entered — these emails serve a second function even when you never pay a fee: any reply identifies your address as monitored by a human willing to engage, which moves you onto higher-value target lists that are resold among fraud operations. The same applies to calling any number in the email. Silence is the correct response. If you ever want to check whether a lottery claim could be genuine, the only meaningful test is whether you personally bought a ticket for that specific draw; everything else is decoration.