On June 6th and then both June 28th and 29th I received bogus blackmail phishing emails, as was described in an article at My Antispyware titled I am a professional hacker EMAIL SCAM. Here’s how it works:
“The scam starts with an email, which claims to be from a professional hacker, who has successfully hacked your operating system and gained full access to your account. The scammer then goes on to say that they have been secretly monitoring all of your activities, including watching you for several months. They claim that your computer was infected with harmful spyware due to the fact that you had visited a website with pornographic content, and that they can see everything on your screen and switch on your camera and microphone at any time.
The scammer then threatens to share a video compilation of you engaging in sexual activities with your contacts unless you pay a ransom. The ransom demand is usually in the form of Bitcoin [in the June 6 case $510 to be paid within fifty hours], and the scammer provides their Bitcoin wallet address for payment. The scammer may also claim to have a list of your contacts and threaten to send the video to them if the ransom is not paid within a certain time frame.”
But those emails were completely generic, except for mentioning my address. They didn’t contain any specific details to back up actually having hacked into my computer. I previously blogged about this scam in a post on January 23, 2019 titled A bogus blackmail phishing email. There I pointed out he couldn’t possibly have any video, because the camera on my iMac was completely masked by a piece of electrical tape. For the June 6th one, I didn’t pay the ransom in fifty hours, and of course nothing happened.
The image of a holdup was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons.
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