8
The 'you have won' letters
Not a heist on a lottery. A heist using the idea of one, and by volume the biggest of the lot.
Advance-fee prize fraud, a letter, email or call telling you that you have won a lottery you did not enter, with a fee to release the prize, takes more money from more people every year than every entry above this one combined.
It works because it is structurally identical to a real promotion right up until the fee, and because it targets people who would find the money genuinely transformative.
The single tell has not changed in a century: a legitimate promotion cannot require a payment to release a prize, because that payment would be consideration and would turn the promotion into an illegal lottery. There is no such thing as a legitimate release fee.