14 DAY TRIAL // The Federal Trade Commission confirmed that an avalanche of email messages claiming to be sent by the federal agency aim to steal the usernames and passwords stored on victims' computers. According to the Associated Press, the emails come from frauddep[at]ftc.gov and inform the receivers that the FTC filed a lawsuit against them. Obviously, the information is fake, but the dangerous side of the message is actually the attachment which is used by the scammers to steal the private details stored on the victims' systems. AP writer Christopher Rugaber sustained the attachment is a virus but there is no information if it can be discovered by an antivirus solution or not.
It's well known that spammers and scammers use fake email addresses to send the messages which are usually signed by famous companies and organizations in order to convince the receivers that the emails are safe to open. However, FTC advises the users to avoid opening the attachments because they never communicate with the residents through email messages.
"Do you receive lots of junk email messages from people you don't know? It's no surprise if you do. As more people use email, marketers are increasingly using email messages to pitch their products and services. Some consumers find unsolicited commercial email - also known as "spam" - annoying and time consuming; others have lost money to bogus offers that arrived in their email in-box," the official FTC website reads.
At this time, there's no solution to stop the spam campaign but you can still inform the Federal Trade Commission about the messages you received. To do so, forward the spam message to spam[at]uce.gov, FTC's spam service which will analyze the content and see if there's anything to do to block the malicious content from being distributed to the vulnerable users.