One address takes entries, one tool reports results, and the government sends no letters. The Department found 2.5 million fraudulent entries in DV-2025.
Reviewed by Ekaterina Fitenko, Esq. — Florida Bar #1064536. With 20+ years of experience in the legal field, she advises Diversity Visa selectees on adjustment of status and consular processing, in English and Russian.
Entries are accepted at dvprogram.state.gov and nowhere else. The regulation is explicit about it: the entry form "is available online at https://dvprogram.state.gov and can only be submitted electronically during the annual entry period." No other website, agency, office or intermediary can put an entry into the drawing, and no other website can take one out.
Three facts follow from that single sentence, and each of them kills a different scam.
An entry submitted anywhere else was not submitted. Money paid to a site that is not this one bought a form that goes nowhere, and the person who paid it usually learns this a year later, when a selection they were promised does not arrive.
The entry period is short. The Department must open it for a period of "not less than thirty days" each fiscal year, and in recent cycles it ran about a month. A site that accepts entries in February is not early — it is not the program.
The address is a government domain. Look at what follows the last dot before the first slash: state.gov. A domain like dv-lottery-2028.com is not the Department of State no matter what the page looks like, and a page can be copied pixel for pixel in an afternoon.
The entry form is DS-5501, the Electronic Diversity Visa Entry Form, and it collects a short list of items: full name, date and place of birth, sex, country of chargeability if different from the country of birth, spouse and children, a mailing address, the nearest consular post, and — since the rule that took effect on 10 April 2026 — passport data.
The passport requirement is the newest part and the one most likely to be missing from advice written before this year. Under 22 CFR 42.33(b)(1)(viii) the entry carries the number of a valid, unexpired passport, the issuing country or authority and the expiration date, and 22 CFR 42.33(b)(3) requires a scan of the biographic and signature page: JPEG, not PDF, no larger than 5 megabytes. Exemptions exist but are narrow, named in 22 CFR 42.2(d), (e) and (g)(2), and have to be supported by evidence.
The Department estimates the form takes 90 minutes to complete and expects roughly 10 million entrants in a cycle. Anyone offering to do it for you in five minutes is selling the part that is not the hard part.
You learn it by going back to the same website yourself and entering your confirmation number in Entrant Status Check. That is the whole mechanism. In the published instructions for the most recent completed cycle the Department wrote that Entrant Status Check "will be the ONLY means by which the Department of State notifies selectees," that it "will not mail notification letters or notify selectees by email," and that "U.S. embassies and consulates will not provide a list of selectees."
The same instructions answer the question directly: "The Department of State will not send you a notification letter. The U.S. government has never sent emails to notify individuals that they have been selected." Not rarely. Never.
This is why the confirmation number matters more than anything else you keep from the entry. It is printed on the confirmation screen at the moment of submission, and the Department does not reissue it on request the way a bank reissues a password. Lose it and you may lose the ability to check your own result. Save the screen as a file, and save it somewhere that survives a lost phone.
Those who are not selected are also told only through the same tool. Silence is not a result.
The scale is documented rather than suspected. In the rulemaking published on 11 March 2026 the Department of State stated that it identified 2.5 million fraudulent entries in the DV-2025 cycle, many of them submitted by third parties on behalf of people who never knew their names had been used. That is the reason the passport requirement exists.
Four patterns account for most of what we see in consultations.
The winning letter. An email or a postal letter announces a selection and asks for a fee, a bank transfer or documents. Because the government sends neither, any such letter is false by construction — including one that arrives with seals, a case number and a consular address.
The lookalike site. A site with a plausible domain collects the same data the real form collects, charges for the "service," and either files nothing or files an entry that belongs to the operator, not to you.
The withheld confirmation number. An agency enters on your behalf and keeps the confirmation number, then sells access to your own result later. The Department addressed this practice by name: it noted entries submitted by third parties who "withhold the entry information unless the individual pays a large fee."
The second entry. Someone offers to improve the odds by entering twice. More than one entry per person in a single fiscal year voids every entry by that person, including the correct one, under INA 204(a)(1)(I)(i). The offer destroys the thing it claims to improve.
The regulation permits another person to file on your request; it does not make that person safer than the form. Registration itself carried no cost in the most recent completed cycle — the instructions state there is "no cost to register for the DV program," with the visa application fee due later, from those who are scheduled for an interview. The 2026 rulemaking also revised the DS-5501 to include a fee payment page, consistent with a $1 Diversity Visa Registration Fee announced separately in the Schedule of Fees for Consular Services; whether and how that applies to a given cycle is stated in the instructions for that cycle, which is the document to read when it appears.
So the honest summary is this: the form is free or nearly free, it takes an hour and a half, and the risks of handing it to a stranger are the confirmation number and your passport scan. If you do use help, insist on two things — that you watch the submission, and that the confirmation screen is saved in front of you.
You will usually discover it in one of two ways: a stranger contacts you claiming you won, or your own entry is refused as a duplicate. Neither is something to resolve by arguing with the stranger.
Keep everything. The email, the domain, the payment request, the name given. If money left your account, it is a payment-fraud matter for your bank and for law enforcement, separate from the immigration question.
Then treat the immigration side as a question about your record rather than about the scam. If an entry exists in your name that you did not file, what matters later is what the government file says about you — and that is readable. A FOIA request for your own immigration file is free and shows what the agencies hold.
A selection does not by itself change your status, and it does not extend one that is ending. If you are selected while physically present in the United States and otherwise eligible, you may apply to adjust status under INA 245(a) rather than going through a consulate — that is a different filing, on a different timetable, and the deadline behind it is unforgiving: eligibility under the program ends with the fiscal year, and a consular officer may not issue the visa after it.
That interaction — a status that expires on one clock and a diversity visa that expires on another — is where an attorney changes the outcome rather than the paperwork. We prepare adjustment filings for selectees and consular packages for those who must travel, in English and Russian.
dvprogram.state.gov, and only that one. The regulation states the entry form is available at that address and "can only be submitted electronically during the annual entry period." Any other site is at best a middleman and at worst a copy built to collect your data.
No. The Department of State has published that it "will not send you a notification letter" and that the U.S. government "has never sent emails to notify individuals that they have been selected." Selection is announced only through Entrant Status Check, which you open yourself using your confirmation number.
Not reliably, and this is the practical reason to save the confirmation screen at the moment you submit. Entrant Status Check asks for the confirmation number together with your personal details, and it is the only channel through which results are given.
For the most recent completed cycle the published instructions state there is no cost to register, with a visa application fee payable later by selectees scheduled for an interview. A separate $1 Diversity Visa Registration Fee has been announced in the Schedule of Fees for Consular Services and the entry form has been revised to include a payment page. What applies to a specific cycle is set out in that cycle's instructions.
No, and it would destroy the entry you already have. Under INA 204(a)(1)(I)(i), if two or more entries are submitted by or for the same person in one fiscal year, all of them are void and that person is out of the drawing for the year.
Yes, unless you fall within a narrow exemption under 22 CFR 42.2(d), (e) or (g)(2), supported by evidence. Since 10 April 2026 the entry carries the passport number, issuing country or authority and expiration date, plus a JPEG scan of the biographic and signature page no larger than 5 megabytes.
$200 for 30 minutes, in English or Russian. Call (305) 315-3425 or email fitenkolaw@gmail.com to schedule, or start with the intake form.
This article is informational only and is not legal advice. Diversity Visa rules, eligible country lists, fees and registration dates change between cycles; confirm current requirements in the instructions published for the cycle you are entering before you rely on anything here.
Fitenko Law PLLC, 11555 Heron Bay Blvd, Suite 277, Coral Springs, FL 33076 (main office); 600 Three Islands Blvd, Hallandale Beach, FL 33009 (by appointment only). Phone: (305) 315-3425. Email: fitenkolaw@gmail.com