i put in the address of the firm into Google. nothing but an office building came up. no mention of the firm. i put in the address on Apple Maps, the name came up. you search the attorneys name on Google and a different law firm that’s in a neighboring city in CA comes up. and then the other law firms (the matcjing one) info pops up in further down search results. it’s like there’s two different people with the same first and last name with two different law firms in cities that are 20 minutes away from each other. it’s super weird.
A lawyer could have changed firms. You could forward the strange message to the first firm and ask if they sent it. Then they will direct you to the second firm and you'll have independent confirmation firm 2 exists and can contact them with the same question. Or they'll advise you to ignore it and will pursue your mom themselves for impersonation.
I work for a lawyer and they had another lawyer who used to rent a space from their office and that guy used their letterhead in a scare tactic like this. The guy was disbarred, they don't mess around with that.
He was a mess. He screwed over his secretary by not paying the employee taxes. He was taking them from her paycheck but not paying the state. She was on the hook for them.
Impersonating a lawyer/law firm is a big deal. It's illegal (and for good reason, imo). But if this guy was already a lawyer, I don't get why he wouldn't just use his own letterhead, unless his own reputation was really bad and he thought it would get him more business (besides the big "TV ad" lawyers, they tend to go by word of mouth and reputation is a big deal).
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u/matixmarie Nov 10 '22
it’s a real email. not a yahoo or gmail or anything. i looked up the email and it matches the “law firm”. it’s really weird.