Lottery News

NJ Lottery was reported for misspelling the address of their second chance website on lottery tickets, leading the players to visit a malevolent website that would install malware on their computer.

According to information put out by the lottery, a store vendor programmed the lottery store registers to print an incorrect web address on tickets for playing “Collect N Win” a second-chance promotion run by the lottery.

The case was first reported by a former software engineer, Bill Bauer, who encountered the error while trying to take advantage of the second chance promotion with the Pick 3 ticket purchased at the Quick Buy Convenience Store. After clicking on the link printed on the ticket, he knew there was something wrong with the website.

As soon as he clicked on the link, a message popped on the screen, saying, “your computer has been hacked” and “it started doing some count done and notified that you have some seconds left to click “here” to correct the problem, that was it, he knew that this was a malicious website.

Players who might have visited the website would have faced some other freaky attacks such as pop-ups and messages that might urge an unsuspecting user to click on something they shouldn't. A website like this might also attempt to load malware or any type of malicious code, without even clicking on anything.

After the New Jersey Lottery was informed about the error, the Communications Manager of the lottery, Missy Gillespie, stated that the website should have read "njcollectandwin.com". The word “and” was replaced with the letter “n”, which possibly would have led a scammer to buy the domain and carry out malicious practices.

The New Jersey Lottery has received approximately 700,000 entries for the Collect N' Win promotion but no calls or emails regarding any hacking problem. The printing error has since been fixed on the tickets.

Currently, the Lottery is looking into the matter and trying to identify who created this fake website and is investigating how they can take down that website. Since then the Lottery is encouraging people to call 800-222-0996 or email [email protected] if they have any concerns or questions.

The scammy website is a look-alike of the common McAfee anti-malware software, stating that the user’s computer is infected. If a person clicks on the fake warning messages, the website would actually infect the person’s computer with malware.

Be aware, click consciously!