New SPAM - Legal Notice

Here is a new one from what I can tell. I removed who it came to but it was a company email.

From: Court attendance notification [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, January 06, 2014 9:53 AM
To: XXXXXXX
Subject: #Hearing of your case in Court 90250

Pretrial notice,

Hereby we inform that you are obliged to come as a defendant
to The Court of Louisiana in February 19, 2014 at 11:30 a.m.
for the hearing of your case of illegal software use.
If necessary you have a right to obtain a lawyer for your protection.

You are kindly asked to have an identity document with you.
Personal appearance is compulsory.

Please find the plaint note with more detailed case information
attached to this letter and study it thoroughly.

Court clerk,
Abigail Tailor

Has anyone else this one?

I haven't seen that particular one, but both the English and the approach just scream malware. It's very similar to several other approaches. The mail is designed to scare people into opening the attachment, which will contain a virus.

The "from" email address is either spoofed, or the email was sent from another computer that is already infected.

Of course in reality, email is NOT used to notify people of upcoming court appearances, let alone of charges against them!

[AlanJones]

Perkins Coie is a legitimate firm of corporate lawyers and are in involved in the Intellectual Property Rights cases.

However (unless things in the US are different to the UK), they would not be issuing a court summons in the name of a court clerk - the court would do that and probably by letter rather than email.

There is an attachment, so my guess would be that it is a virus or malware of some sort.

Anyone who received a similar email and is concerned that it is legitimate would be advised to either contact Perkins Coie or the court concerned and do not open the attachment.

I also got this notice. I emailed Perkins Coie and got a response back immediately with confirmation that this is indeed spam. Here is a link to a release from Perkins Coie that was attached to the email from them http://www.perkinscoie.com/news/news_detail.aspx?news=1564

[AlanJones]

For the purpose of Google, from the link that mojudd posted (thanks)

Fraudulent Court Appearance Email
General News
01.06.2014
There has been an email spoof attack that is impersonating the domain name of several large law firms, including Perkins Coie.

This spoof attack involves an email falsely purporting to be from Perkins Coie or another law firm and describing a fictitious court appearance. Please be aware that it did not originate from Perkins Coie. In addition, please be aware that the email may contain a link to a computer virus. You should not open the email, any attachments, nor respond to it in any way.

We want to emphasize that this spoofing attack is not the result of any compromise of the security systems at Perkins Coie. If you have any questions, please contact [email protected].

I received a VERY similar e-mail this afternoon!!

... very scary!

Pretrial notice,

Hereby we inform that you are obliged to come as a defendant
to The Court of Louisiana in February 26, 2014 at 09:30 a.m.
for the hearing of your case of illegal software use.
If necessary you have a right to obtain a lawyer for your protection.

You are kindly asked to have an identity document with you.
Personal appearance is compulsory.

Please find the plaint note with more detailed case information
attached to this letter and study it thoroughly.

Court clerk,
Lily Mason

I received this also. Not a business owner, actually not even employed.
I see there is other site reporting this as a scam.
Kinda scared me for a second, I just downloaded a program last night.
Courts usually sends notices either certified mail, or through a sheriff's office for law suits.
All is good, didn't open it.
And now I found this site to help with scam and malware.
Thanks for websites like this looking out for us!

I received this email today also. 4 things stood out to me: incorrect English with the use of the word "in" instead of "on" in conjunction with the date, the date itself because this is not a leap year, therefore Feb. 29, 2014 doesn't exist, it's a zip file instead of a document, and courts always mail letters, they do not send emails to notify you of a required court appearance.

This is the email, sent from [email protected]:

Pretrial notice,

Hereby we inform that you are obliged to come as a defendant
to The Court of Louisiana in February 29, 2014 at 09:30 a.m.
for the hearing of your case of illegal software use.
If necessary you have a right to obtain a lawyer for your protection.

You are kindly asked to have an identity document with you.
Personal appearance is compulsory.

Please find the plaint note with more detailed case information
attached to this letter and study it thoroughly.

Court clerk,
Dorothy Mason

I received the first email posted, had a jumpy heart moment, then thought it ridiculous and calmed down. There was an attachment, too, but I'm not game to open it, thinking it's probably a virus.

Acknowledgement to onlinethreatalerts.com for this message:

This malicious email message has an attachment called Court_Notice_Jones_Day_Wa#8127.zip, which contains the malicious Trojan horse file Court_Notice_Jones_Day_Washington.exe. Attempts to open the Court_Notice_Jones_Day_Washington.exe file will infect your computer with a Trojan horse.

When scanned the file Court_Notice_Jones_Day_Washington.exe, the following threats were detected:

W32/Trojan.FYVU-3852
W32/Trojan3.GXT
W32/Zbot.FG!tr
HEUR:Trojan.Win32.Generic

Once your computer has become infected with this malicious Trojan horse, the cybercriminals behind this email message will be able to access and take control of your computer remotely from anywhere around the world. They may spy on you, use your computer to commit cybercrimes, or steal your personal and financial information.

Now, if you have already opened this malicious attachment (Court_Notice_Jones_Day_Washington.exe), please do a full scan of your computer with the antivirus software installed on it. The name of the attachment may change, so be careful when opening email attachments.

Never open an attachment that has a name ending with “.exe”, because these are computer programs that can infect your computer with a virus or some other malware.

Yes, I just received this pretrial notice, also from Abigail Turner ([email protected]). Same wording but from the Court of Atlanta, with a .zip file attached. I'm deleting it now.

I started getting "Legal Notice" attachments in late December. I think I've received 15 - 20 legal notices from 3 or 4 different "court clerks." Shockingly, court clerks do not deliver legal notices....they have to come through personal service of process. Don't open the attachment!

Thanks to those who have added information here. This was obviously widely spammed out by the criminals behind it.

Hi, I received two of these today, with different names as court clerks.

Being confident in my anti-virus software attempted to download the zip file.
My software indicated a virus in the file and refused permission for the download.

So yeah, truly a scam

Just for the fun of it all, I downloaded the "ZIP" file to a thumb drive through a Mac, unzipped the "EXE", and then plugged it into my Windows XP computer (with JUST Windows installed and Microsoft Windows Defender) with the internet disconnected, and ran it. What it will do is hide all your files and expose all your system files EVERYWHERE as well as rename itself and/or delete the original and make a copy of itself as a renamed version of the name of the disk drive that you have it on in the first place. So, DO NOT WHAT SO EVER DOWNLOAD EVEN THE "ZIP" FILE and Microsoft Windows Defender obviously will not pick up on it. I also checked my families inboxes and found identical copies of the message.

(PS: The Mac is fine [for now], the Windows computer needed to be reinstalled any ways because of faulty temporary memory, and I am doing a 35 pass erase on the thumb drive to make sure the file is FOR SURE GONE.)