A few days back I recieved an email about an international lottery win notification in my name, for which I had invested nothing, and when I contacted them, they are ready to send the amount (in lacs) to my bank from Europe. I require the Islamic point of view whether such wins are supposed to be taken and used or not.
Answer
In my opinion, if you receive an amount unexpectedly without doing anything wrong, it’s not prohibited for you to benefit from it. All that you need to do is to spend 20% of it in the way of Allah as charity. In case you would have contributed some amount in the lottery before your ‘prize’ was declared, it would have been prohibited in Islam for it being maysir (gambling).
Having said that, I must warn you that the message informing you about your prize money is a trap. As soon as you would ask them to send you the amount (which at times is unimaginably huge), they will ask you to deposit a ‘small’ fee (valuing close to Rs. 50,000 or even more), to enable them to transfer the amount. My very confident guess is that after a person commits the blunder of sending the amount, he/she never hears from them again. In other words, some people have devised an ingenious way of making money by enticing people that they will receive millions of dollars if they deposit a few hundred dollars first. I would urge you to stay away from losing your halal wealth unnecessarily.