Novel scam calls
She sounded English, rang my home landline number and used my correct title and surname, which is unheard of. (Spam callers mostly misaddress me by a first name that I don't use, which is an invaluable tell-tale.) And the call came from an unhidden London exchange number, also not at all usual.
The reverse lookup records a lot of previous reports about unsolicited calls from that number, as follows:
"💡 The overall rating for telephone number 020 3154 6770 is Negative. There have been 3,372 phone lookups and 107 comments relating to this number. On this page: 12 Users rated it as Dangerous, 6 Users rated it as Harassing and 2 Users rated it as Unknown.
The summary of detected keywords found in the reports is as follow: scam (12 times), lottery (9 times), bank (5 times), spam (1 time), credit card (1 time)"
Fortunately, I've never played a lottery in my life, so being told that the caller was "from the Lottery Department" didn't sound right. And she broke off the call when I asked where she'd got my name and number from, since I've never played any lottery.
So don't be fooled into believing that you've won the lottery if a civilised-sounding English stranger rings your home number and addresses you by your correct name. It's just yet another scam, although I didn't wait long enough to find out exactly what they wanted.