Even Police Departments get spammed with Court Appearance SPAM?!

We thought this amusing and worth bringing to your attention.   It’s a great example of SPAM/SCAM email, and what to recognize in an email to see how legitimate it is, or isn’t.

• There are 2 flags already.  The Court system doesn’t communicate via email, notifying those involved that they need to appear. A notification would not go to a general department email address. This in itself makes the following kind of redundant.
• Notice that the “Court Date” on each email had already passed – creating a sense of panic/urgency.
• Important email like this would come from an individual, not “State Court”, or “District Court”
• The email addresses in each email are likely hacked or spoofed.  Any court system would not send an email from an address attached to healthy smoothies (?!), or a music site in Russia (note the “.ru” part of the email address in the second).
• The brevity, the lack of information, the wording and other subtleties in the messages also raise flags.

So, why do they do it?  Well, both of these messages had attachments that would have contained the “Case Information” – oh, and a Virus.
That’s the objective.   Pretend to be someone, somewhere they’re not, panic a user, cause the user to blindly open an attachment and immediately infect their computer.

What can you do to keep your property and information safe?

• Use your common sense.
• Breath, and don’t panic.
• Look for the flags we noted above, and apply them to any suspicious email you may receive.
• Don’t open attachments from strangers. 
• Delete the message.

State Court ([email protected])
Notice to appear in Court #00157871 Oct 25

The second was:

District Court ([email protected])

Notice of appearance in Court #0000918209 Oct 23