As crypto currencies are growing popular day-by-day, many scams are also taking place.
The latest one of which is a series of blackmail campaigns run with the help of emails now being referred to as the "Sextortion" scam.
The scam started of in 2017, but the list of victims grew in mid-2018. According to research by Digital Shadows, a UK-based digital risk assessment firm that tracked over 792,000 targeted emails, Bitcoin in the range of $300,000 was stolen from over 3,100 unique BTC addresses.
In these scams the victims were sent an email with a threat that an explicit video of them was recorded, via their webcam, and would be floated on the Internet if a certain amount of Bitcoins were not sent to a given address. (guess that's the reason they ask you to cover your webcam !)
The scam began in 2017, but it piques the interest of the larger community only after its list of victims grew in mid-2018. According to research by Digital Shadows, a UK-based digital risk assessment firm that tracked over 792,000 targeted emails, Bitcoin in the range of $300,000 was stolen from over 3,100 unique BTC addresses.
The report further stated that the funds were then deposited in as many as 92 Bitcoin addresses. The firm further suggested that the criminals engaged in “sextortion” and extorted an amount totaling $540 in Bitcoin from each victim.
The report defined “sextortion,” as follows,
“Spam campaign claiming to have footage of recipient watching pornography. Included threats to publicly release video.”
Victims of this scam were sent an email with a threat that an explicit video of them was recorded, via their webcam, and would be floated on the Internet if a certain amount of Bitcoins were not sent to a given address.
Digital Shadows ( a security related firm) reported a divergence of emails sent to victims, with some showing bare understanding of how to craft an email and how its distribution worked, resulting in some of them being deposited in the spam folder. Others were well curated and sent from newly created Outlook email addresses.
The mails was sent from various IP addresses which belonged to different countries that included Vietnam and Brazil. The research firm suggested that the email servers could have been compromised, which was why specifying an accurate location was inconclusive.
New accomplices were hired by the scammers to continue their ongoing operations and were paid around $360,000 a year, the report said. Additionally, the criminals who had skills in network management, penetration testing and programming expertise were paid $768,000 a year. This further suggests that the people who were involved in this were much more well prepared than those who were a part of the several other scams that took place.!
Individuals who had a high net-worth were targeted for these scams on social media. Furthermore, the scammers also targeted the victim’s marital status, using it to form an online relationship with a married person and threatening to reveal details of the same if the ransom in Bitcoins was not paid.