Cybercriminals are constantly trying to fool you into clicking on an attachment in a e-mail so that they can infect your computer with harmful and malicious viruses so that they can either access and take control of your computer, use your computer to comit more cybercrimes, to steal your personal and financial information or simply to spy on you.
In order to convince you to open up the attachment, they either tell you that you have won something and that you have to click on the attached file or tell you that something horrible has happened to you and you must open the file. Cybercriminals come up with all kinds of schemes in an attempt to get you to click on that infected file that has been attached to their e-mail.
The latest scheme they are using is to scare people into believing that they have been summoned to court. The goal is to trick people into opening the malicious attachment by
claiming that they have been scheduled to appear in court. I myself have gotten this e-mail. This is what it says:
Notice to Appear,
Hereby you are notified that you have been scheduled to appear for your hearing that
will take place in the court of San Francisco in January 8, 2014 at 09:00 am.
Please bring all documents and witnesses relating to this case with you to Court on your hearing date.
The copy of the court notice is attached to this letter.
Please, read it thoroughly.
Note: If you do not attend the hearing the judge may hear the case in your absence.
Yours truly,
Abigail Mason
Clerk to the Court.
If you get an e-mail like this, the best thing to do is either delete it or report this e-mail as spam to the company that provides your email account.
The criminals who have hatched this scheme do not know how the American court system works in notifying someone that they must appear in court. The first red flag is the wording of the e-mail. No Judge or lawyer would ever write a court notice like this. The second red flag is that if a Judge or lawyer wants to you to show up for court, they will NEVER send you an e-mail. What they will do is hire either a police officer or a professional company that serves legal documents to your home or
office and hand you a paper saying you must come to court. The final red flag is the attached file that comes with the fake court notice. The attachment has a program that ends with ".exe" which is a sign that it is a computer program that will infect your computer with a virus or some other malware. Sometimes the malicious virus comes as a zip file. Do not click on it.
It is important to know that sometimes the name of the file may not end with ".exe." The name of the attachment may change, so be careful
when opening email attachments. Click here for a list of email attachments you should never open, regardless of where they came from.
Always do a virus scan before opening up an attachment. If you have gotten this e-mail and have clicked on the attachment, immediately do a full scan of your computer using an antivirus software. If you don’t have antivirus software installed on your computer, please click here for a list of free antivirus software.
