There’s an email purporting to be from Federal Express, claiming that a parcel was sent to your home address and it will arrive within 5 business days. There’s an attachment in the email for the recipient to obtain more information and the parcels tracking number.
This email is not from FedEx and do not open the attachment named (FedEx mail.zip). The attached zip file is a Trojan that will install itself without the knowledge or consent from the user. This Trojan will launch pop ups alerting the user that their computer is infected with viruses.
Notice the misspelled words in the email. This is a good indicator that it's a scam.
The Trojan installs a fake antivirus program that will automatically launch and scan the computer for viruses. The fake antivirus program will report false and or exaggerated threats on the computer. In order to remove the false threats from the computer, the user will need to purchase the full license version of the fake antivirus program.
This is a very popular scam that tricks people into paying for a program that is a fake. If you were infected by this attachment, please follow the instructions below to remove the FedEx Trojan.
How to Remove Fake Antivirus Programs
- Reboot your PC and hit F8 to run your computer in Safe Mode with Networking.
- Download MalwareBytes to your desktop and rename it to Explorer.exe as Windows Security 2011 blocks the program named MalwareBytes. If you can’t download files, try using another machine that’s not infected and saving the files to a flash drive or other storage device.
- Download and Run RKILL to stop all background processes related to Windows Security 2011.
- Launch MalwareBytes and run a (Full Scan) to remove infections.
- Delete the file called “Hosts” in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\HOSTS and add the default Hosts file (below) for your operating system in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\
a. Windows XP HOSTS File Download Link
b. Windows 7 HOSTS File Download Link
- Reboot your computer.
Your computer should be clean and working normal again.
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They must have tried a couple of dozen times to get me with this scam. Not to mention, they tried the same scam but using UPS. I can’t believe people actually fall for this type of thing.
I have seen a lot of these in my inbox. I have received these emails purporting to be from fedex, ups, dhl, and a couple of shipping firms that I have never heard of before. They seem to be quite persistent scammers.
James,
I get them every week and you know some one is falling for this scam.
Haven’t seen this one yet, but I will now be on the look out. I keep getting some phishing email from Paypal which is scary. I often wonder how many non tech savvy people get scammed with these emails.
This happens to me too.
however, all of my documents and files are gone and the windows vista recovery tool warn me.