It seems the ‘appearance in court’ scam is alive and well
It seems that an old scam is making the rounds again — an email with a subject line identifying the communication as “Notice to appear in court” but is actually a vehicle used to deliver a nasty computer virus.
According to the folks over at Snopes.com, that scam first appeared around 2013 and has kept going since then. For an idea of the email content, the following is a copy of the scam I received yesterday:
Notice to Appear, You have to appear in the Court on the September 03. Please, prepare all the documents relating to the case and bring them to Court on the specified date. Note: If you do not come, the case will be heard in your absence. You can review complete details of the Court Notice in the attachment. Kind regards, Stephen Clayton, District Clerk.
The email also comes with a nasty attachment that, once opened and executed, puts a virus on your computer (the virus file in the email I received was called “000665041.zip” and that set of numerals was keyed to the bogus “notice number” in the email subject.
Nothing bad happened when I opened and read the email, but under no circumstance should anyone ever download the attachment and execute it. That will lead to nothing but trouble.