The Office of Information Technology (OIT) would like you to be aware of fraudulent email messages that claim to be from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), with the following subject line: You visit illegal website or a variant on that theme. Please be advised that email messages of this nature are indeed fraudulent and are not sent from the FBI. Do not open any of the attachments that accompany this email. If you do open the attachment, your computer could become infected with a virus.
The text of the email reads:
Dear Sir/Madam,
we have logged your IP-address on more than 40 illegal Websites.
Important: Please answer our questions! The list of questions are attached.
Yours faithfully,
M. John Stellford
Federal Bureau of Investigation -FBI-
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Room 2130
Washington, DC 20535
202) 324-3000
The attachment can come in several forms and is often designed to appear to be an indictment. As in nearly all such scams, the most important thing users can do is not open the attachment. Such scams are increasingly common on the Internet. Opening email attachments exposes a users computer to an electronic attack. In general, avoid opening email attachments, even if they appear to come from people you know.
Many computer virus infections deliberately send infected email to all addresses in an infected computers email address book; if your friends computer gets an infection, that computer will send you an infected email that appears to be from your friend in hopes of infecting your computer as well, and the process continues. If you receive email from someone you know with an attachment you werent expecting, call the sender on the telephone before opening the attachment to be certain the mail was not possibly generated by a virus or scam artist.
