Extortion scammers send out threats indiscriminately, using big batches of email addresses and associated passwords that they likely obtained on the black market following big corporate data breaches. Online extortionists might also claim to have caught you in a different sexually compromising situation, like cheating on your spouse, or even to have planted a bomb at your workplace. There’s little chance the cyber-blackmailer has really invaded your computer. The pornography scenario, termed “sextortion,” accounts for a large share of email extortion complaints, and these have spiked amid the coronavirus outbreak as people are spending more time at home and online, according to the FBI. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) documented 43,101 cases of online extortion in 2019, with victims suffering losses of $107.5 million. When the message does get through, it can be lucrative. An extortion scam is a type of scam where someone threatens, coerces, or blackmails the victim into providing a form of payment or service.
#Extortion emails software
Cybersecurity company Symantec says its software blocked almost 289 million extortion emails in the first five months of 2019. To make it even more intimidating, some scammers tinker with their email messages, filling in the “From” section with your actual email address to create the illusion that they have control of your account. That there have been actual cases of hackers gaining access to people’s webcams gives the scam a veneer of plausibility. They hope to stumble across a few people who don’t change their passwords regularly or do have some secret they don’t want known. There’s little chance the cyber-blackmailer has really invaded your computer.
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