I have recently received one of these emails and my first (irrational of course) reaction was to think about all of the things that could land me in the situation of having to appear in court. Then, I actually opened the email and had a look, instantly I realised it was a fake and either a hoax or a way to distribute viruses/malware to unsuspecting victims. Doing a bit of further research on the matter, I was right.

This is the text of the email I received, it came from the address "Notice to Appear "

Notice to Appear,

The copy of the court notice is attached to this letter.
Please, read it thoroughly.

Truly yours,
Clerk to the Court.
Olivia Smith

This email was scanned by VIPRE version 4.0.3904 when it was sent, using definitions version 28332

First of all, there was no attachment. Second, I tried seeing what the defenselawyerssanfrancisco.com domain actually hosts, that came up with a 404 error page, so that's a dead end. Doing a whois search on the domain didn't show up much either. It smelled fishy.

I did a google search on the email subject and that gave me definite results reporting it as a malware distribution email.

The email I received didn't come with any attachments, but the body of the email did explicitly refer to an attached document. Not sure whether my email server filtered that out of not, so I cannot confirm the contents of the attachment. In either case, I would not be recommending for anyone to open it, especially if it's an .exe file and you're on Windows.

-i