While reading articles on the Mail & Guardian site, a 'work & live in the USA' ad caught my attention. Out of curiosity I started to fill out their on-line application. There are so many of these so called lotteries on the net, all 'promising' some sort of work permit in the US, I decided, 'what the hell,' it's on M&G, cant be all that bad. After filling out all my details I 'arrive' on the last page, and lo and behold it asked for a 59euro fee. I stop and cancel my application.

Twenty minutes later I received a call from the US asking if their was a problem with the application and could assistance be given in completing the application. I said no thanks and asked how they got my number seeing that I didn't complete the application, it should have been cancelled. A lame answer was given about trying to help.

In the background I have Mcafee SiteAdvisor running. which indicates if sites are 'bad' -red, - a lot of bad links, spam, etc, green, Yellow and Grey all giving different values to sites. I decided to view the site details and one of the points it indicated was that the US State department does the lottery for free.

So the question is, "Are these Green Card sites scams, or do they really have a draw and someone actually wins?" One winner and thousands of people paying, hoping to go and work in the "land of the free."