Immigrant visa is necessary for being in the United States. For a permanent stay in the United States and for the work permit and filing of taxes, a green card is required. There are several ways to obtain a permanent resident status. The Diversity Visa Lottery program is one of those methods. There are many people now applying for this program through many sources. Statistics show that there are about 6.4 million applications for the 2008 Diversity Visa Lottery program or Green Card Lottery program. When account dependents are considered there were about 10 million applications for Green Card Lottery program. The highest numbers of applications were from the country of Bangladesh.

Applications from Africa were 41% and from Asia were 38% in 2008 Green card lottery. There are however many scam programs related to the issuance of the Green Card through lottery services. Reports show that the fraudulent green card lottery programs take money from the applicants in terms of the application fees between 50$ to 250$ and do not process the applications. There are now many websites relating to the green card lottery entry and issuance of immigrant visa to the USA. Attracting the customers with exciting claims is not very difficult with advancement in marketing strategies.

Some Diversity Visa programs claim that they would provide free airline ticket to the winner and some might even claim that they can increase the chance of becoming a winner which can be false. The winner would be issued an immigrant visa prior to the issuance of green card and it is issued by the Immigration Naturalization Services.

Applicants are advised to use the United States Government approved Green Card Lottery programs to get the most, out of their efforts in getting the immigrant visawith permanent residence status. These are available on the US government official websites. The State of Department has issued warnings to websites providing fraudulent information to the applicants. The best way to apply is to do a small research on the available sources for the issuance of green card and then decide upon which website to trust and go about with the application. There are also several testimonials available online expressing the satisfaction of some of the green card lottery program's participants and the individuals can use them to come to a decision. The Encyclopedia has loads of information regarding this which can be used to verify whether a website is genuine or fraudulent.