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Cybercrime: Sextortion (Blackmail For Sex, Porn, Etc.)

uair01

uair01

Antediluvian
Joined
Apr 12, 2005
Messages
5,459
Location
The Netherlands
Interesting :) This is a wicked extortion attempt. It got my attention because of this subject line:
[my real name] - [one of my real passwords]

Then it continues like this:
Thatcher Petkova <[email protected]>
I do‌ know [one of my real passwords] o‌n‌e o‌f yo‌ur pa‌ss wo‌rds. L‌ets get ri‌ght to‌ th‌e purpo‌s‌e. Th‌er‌e i‌s no‌ on‌e who‌ ha‌s pa‌id m‌e to‌ ch‌eck yo‌u. Yo‌u do‌n't kno‌w me a‌nd you'r‌e pro‌ba‌bly wonderi‌ng why yo‌u a‌r‌e getting thi‌s ‌e ma‌i‌l?

i‌n fa‌ct, i setup a‌ so‌ftwa‌re o‌n th‌e 18+ str‌ea‌mi‌ng (po‌rn) w‌ebsit‌e a‌nd you kno‌w wha‌t, yo‌u visi‌t‌ed thi‌s si‌t‌e to‌ ha‌v‌e fun (yo‌u kno‌w what i‌ m‌ea‌n). Wh‌en you w‌er‌e wa‌tching vi‌deos, your int‌ernet bro‌ws‌er sta‌rted o‌p‌era‌ti‌ng as a‌ RDP having a k‌ey lo‌gg‌er whi‌ch pro‌vi‌ded m‌e a‌cc‌essi‌bi‌li‌ty to‌ yo‌ur di‌spla‌y scr‌e‌en and also w‌ebca‌m. Ri‌ght a‌fter tha‌t, my so‌ftwa‌re co‌ll‌ect‌ed yo‌ur co‌mpl‌et‌e co‌ntacts fro‌m yo‌ur M‌esseng‌er, Fa‌c‌ebo‌o‌k, a‌s w‌ell a‌s ‌e-ma‌i‌la‌ccount. a‌nd then i‌ cr‌ea‌t‌ed a‌ do‌uble-scre‌en vid‌eo‌. 1st pa‌rt di‌splays th‌e vi‌d‌eo‌ you w‌er‌e vi‌ewi‌ng (yo‌u ha‌v‌e a‌ go‌o‌d taste ro‌fl), and n‌ext pa‌rt displa‌ys th‌e reco‌rdi‌ng of yo‌ur w‌eb cam, y‌ea‌ i‌ts u.

Yo‌u a‌ctually ha‌v‌e two‌ differ‌ent solutions. W‌e are go‌ing to‌ ta‌ke a‌ lo‌o‌k at th‌es‌e types o‌f so‌luti‌o‌ns i‌n pa‌rticula‌rs:
Fi‌rst choi‌ce is to just i‌gno‌r‌e thi‌s ‌ema‌il messa‌ge. i‌n thi‌s si‌tua‌tio‌n, i a‌m go‌ing to‌ s‌end yo‌ur actua‌l vi‌d‌eo‌ to‌ every si‌ngl‌e o‌ne o‌f yo‌ur conta‌cts and th‌en imagine a‌bout th‌e di‌sgra‌c‌e yo‌u will get. a‌nd d‌efi‌ni‌t‌ely i‌n ca‌se yo‌u a‌r‌e in an intima‌t‌e rela‌ti‌o‌nshi‌p, just how it can aff‌ect?

in the s‌eco‌nd pla‌ce o‌ptio‌n wi‌ll b‌e to‌ pay m‌e $7000. We will ca‌ll i‌t a‌ do‌na‌ti‌o‌n. in thi‌s si‌tuati‌on, i‌ mo‌st certai‌nly wi‌ll instanta‌n‌eo‌usly ‌elimina‌t‌e your vi‌d‌eo‌ fo‌ota‌ge. Yo‌u co‌uld go‌ o‌n with yo‌ur dai‌ly routi‌ne lik‌e thi‌s n‌ever ha‌pp‌en‌ed a‌nd yo‌u wo‌uld n‌ev‌er h‌ea‌r ba‌ck aga‌i‌n fro‌m m‌e.

Yo‌u'll mak‌e th‌e pa‌ym‌ent vi‌a Bitco‌i‌n (i‌f yo‌u do‌n't know this, s‌ea‌rch for 'ho‌w to‌ buy bi‌t‌co‌i‌n' i‌n Go‌o‌gl‌e).
B‌T‌C‌ a‌ddr‌ess to s‌end to‌: 1CFkYtZhREM1wkfcwycZdcyq5PUGgpg8GG [ca‌s‌e-S‌eNSi‌Ti‌V‌e so‌ co‌py & pa‌st‌e i‌t]

if yo‌u ar‌e wo‌nd‌ering a‌bo‌ut go‌ing to‌ the law, go‌o‌d, thi‌s ‌ema‌il canno‌t be tra‌ced ba‌ck to‌ me. I‌ ha‌ve co‌v‌ered my mo‌v‌es. i‌ a‌m no‌t tryi‌ng to‌ cha‌rg‌e a f‌e‌e v‌ery much, i would li‌k‌e to‌ be pa‌i‌d fo‌r. i‌ ha‌ve a uniqu‌e pi‌x‌el wi‌thin thi‌s mai‌l, and a‌t thi‌s mom‌ent i‌ kno‌w tha‌t you hav‌e r‌ead this ‌email messa‌g‌e. Yo‌u ha‌ve on‌e day to‌ pa‌y. if i do no‌t r‌ec‌ei‌v‌e the B‌i‌tC‌o‌i‌ns, i will d‌efi‌na‌t‌ely s‌end o‌ut yo‌ur video‌ to‌ a‌ll o‌f yo‌ur conta‌cts i‌ncludi‌ng fri‌‌ends a‌nd fa‌mi‌ly, co‌wo‌rk‌ers, a‌nd so‌ o‌n. No‌n‌ethel‌ess, if i‌ do‌ g‌et pa‌id, i wi‌ll ‌era‌s‌e the vid‌eo‌ imm‌edi‌a‌t‌ely. it's a no‌n-n‌ego‌tiabl‌e o‌ffer therefo‌re pl‌ea‌se do‌n't waste my p‌erso‌nal tim‌e and yo‌urs by r‌eplyi‌ng to‌ thi‌s ema‌il m‌essa‌g‌e. i‌f you wa‌nt evi‌denc‌e, reply wi‌th Y‌ea‌! th‌en i‌ will send o‌ut yo‌ur vi‌d‌eo‌ to yo‌ur 14 fri‌‌ends.

What really happened is that some time ago I used my name + one disposable password to create an account on some shitty site. Then the shitty site got hacked and my account name + password was stolen and sold. Now someone is using that database for extortion. I'm one of the random "victims". There is also no pixel in the mail (I was curious).

Of course I don't take this seriously and of course I won't pay anything. But I'm intrigued if the "criminal" gets any money from any of his victims. There are no transactions at this bitcoin address: https://www.blockchain.com/nl/btc/address/1CFkYtZhREM1wkfcwycZdcyq5PUGgpg8GG

And it's an old scam, other's have had similar attempts:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07...-recipients-hacked-passwords/comment-page-13/
However, all three recipients said the password was close to ten years old, and that none of the passwords cited in the sextortion email they received had been used anytime on their current computers.

And an interesting (and sad) comments there:
Sadly one person felt for this scam and sent the ransom money on July 7th:
https://bitref.com/1Dvd7Wb72JBTbAcfTrxSJCZZuf4tsT8V72
wow someone paid the ransom!
https://bitref.com/1HH79G9DqFscMpfZs1uPzNNw3bQwdcNvZN

And wow:
Just from the BTC addresses posted by readers here, we can see that those addresses received almost $80,000 in Bitcoin over the last ten days. That’s pretty incredible.
 
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This 'you've been caught watching porn!' blackmail one is currently doing the rounds. Many of my friends have received it. We are mostly female and most of us don't even have cameras on our laptops. Big scam but a lot of people are terrified and paying up, apparently.
 
I got one of those sextortion mails today. Doesn't spook me, but I can imagine that some people might be scared.
They did something strange with the font, so I can't just copy the text here. So a screenprint.

There's no cash in their wallet yet:
https://bitref.com/141MPceifW53CmXAA6VziJuMYVMphKq2Ua
1588421440915.png
 
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Naughty_Felid said:
Why cover it up?
Click to expand...

Your question set my mind wandering. Indeed I have no secrets with my partner, and I don't mind that my internet provider sees the rare times that curiosity wins and my prudence loses. But imagine you're living in an autocratic regime. For example China.
And then I saw that there is Wikipedia page for that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_China

:)
For some users, the quantity of advertisements on these websites can be uncomfortable and frustrating. Sometimes there is no pornographic content available after the advertisements have been navigated. The chance of picking up malware in the process is high

:oops:
In October 2006 authorities closed down "Erotica Juneday", which charged its highest-paying members 3,999 yuan (then around $490) a year, and sentenced founder Chen Hui to life imprisonment.
 
Note: this was found totally innocently while searching for artists who use landscape webcams for their art. So don't you think I'm actively searching for this stuff. It all arrives at my doorstep of its own volition :cool:

Webcam Scams: Inside The Dark World Of Online Blackmail And Sextortion
Webcam Scams: Inside the Dark World of Online Blackmail and Sextortion (fightthenewdrug.org)

Actually this is a neat scam:

The “23-year-old Lebanese girl” who “chatted with” Samir on Skype was almost certainly a young man from Oued Zem, a small town in central Morocco that has become known as the capital of the “sextortion” industry.

The Oued Zem scammers trawl Facebook for people who will take the bait, and as soon as a man answers a video call—either on Skype or, increasingly, within Facebook itself—they activate software that shows the porn consumer a pre-recorded video of a girl downloaded from a porn webcam site.

They are so familiar with this video that they are able to chat-message their porn consumers at exactly the points where the girl appears to be typing on the keyboard.

“We ask him to take off his clothes and to do obscene gestures,” says one young scammer I will call Omar.

“It’s crucial that … this is filmed with his face on screen so the video looks credible. When we’ve got the recording we upload it to YouTube and send it to him in a private message. That’s when the threatening starts. We spend 20 minutes chatting, 20 minutes for the video, and 20 minutes threatening – threatening and negotiating. They all pay.”

He adds, “The weak point of Arabs is sex. So you look for their weaknesses, and you exploit them. The other weakness is when they are married, for example. You can exploit that. Then there are the really religious guys. You see someone who looks like a sheikh, carrying the Koran, and you think, ‘There’s no way he’ll fall for this – but let’s try him anyway.’ And when you try, he falls for it.”

Omar says he earns about $500 (£400) every day from the scam, and that hundreds of other young men in Oued Zem are doing the same.
 
While searching for something different I stumbled on this professional article on sextortion:
The Revival and Rise of Email Extortion Scams | Symantec Blogs (security.com)
Almost 300 million extortion scam emails were blocked by Symantec in the first five months of 2019.
In most of these scam emails, the attacker claims to have a recording of you visiting a porn website, though in some cases the attacker pretends to be a member of law enforcement who has found child pornography on your device.
The big exception to this is the bomb scare emails, where the sender claims to have planted a bomb in your building that will be triggered if the requested amount of money is not paid.

Are these scams successful?
When it comes to the success of these scams, if we examine the 5,000 most-seen Bitcoin addresses in May, we can see that 63 of those wallets received bitcoins in 243 transactions. In total, the wallets received 12.8 bitcoins in that period—at the end of May one bitcoin was worth approximately US$8,300, meaning these wallets received a total of approximately US$106,240. If we take that as an average amount to make in a 30-day period for these kinds of scams, it means they are making just over US$1.2 million in a year ($1,292,586). For the amount of effort and skill that is required to carry out these scams, it represents a pretty good return on investment.
 
uair01 said:
In most of these scam emails, the attacker claims to have a recording of you visiting a porn website, though in some cases the attacker pretends to be a member of law enforcement who has found child pornography on your device.
Click to expand...
If people are paying up they must have done these things and think paying up is damage limitation.
 
Sextortionists are increasingly targeting younger men and teens on social media, and the victims are increasingly resorting to suicide ...
'Sextortionists' are increasingly targeting young men for money. The outcome can be deadly.

Internet blackmailers are increasingly duping young men and boys into sending them sexually explicit content online by posing as young girls on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and then extorting them in a scheme known as "sextortion" — and dozens of these cases have ended with the victims taking their own lives, police and child advocates told NBC News. ...

“The FBI is receiving an increasing number of reports of adults posing as young girls coercing young boys through social media to produce sexual images and videos and then extorting money from them” ...

Dozens of boys have reported being “victims of sextortion; mostly for money, although others were reportedly sextorted for additional images,” the agency said in a subsequent news release.

One of those victims was 17-year-old Ryan Last, who lived near San Jose, California. Last died by suicide in February after an extortionist, threatening to post compromising pictures of him on the internet, was demanding more and more money from the teen, his mother, Pauline Stuart, said. ...
Click to expand...
SOURCE: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-n...rgeting-young-men-money-outcome-can-rcna27281
 
Another tragic case.

Two people have been arrested in Nigeria over an alleged sextortion attempt against an Australian schoolboy who took his own life.

Australian police say the teenage victim had traded explicit images with a person online before they began making threats and demanding money.

After a global investigation, the pair allegedly responsible were tracked down in Nigeria, where they will face court.

Police say sextortion - particularly of young people - is dramatically rising.

Details of the boy's age or where he lived in New South Wales (NSW) have not been released publicly to protect his family's privacy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-68720247
 
escargot said:
If people are paying up they must have done these things and think paying up is damage limitation.
Click to expand...
That's the whole scam.
The scammers don't know or have evidence of wrong-doing, they just blast out thousands of accusations. One is bound to hit someone with a guilty conscience.
We used to get regular emails to our business address, claiming either:
1) We have gained control of your computer department and will shut you down unless you give XYZ bitcoin
or
2) I have recordings from your webcam and will send them out, along with a list of sites you have been visiting to your entire customer email list unless ... etc.
Of course, it was utter nonsense. So we always ignored them.
It's playing on guilt. Some people might feel guilty over really trivial things, that aren't worth paying the blackmail but many victims feel alone and without any guidance.
 
Stormkhan said:
That's the whole scam.
The scammers don't know or have evidence of wrong-doing, they just blast out thousands of accusations. One is bound to hit someone with a guilty conscience.
We used to get regular emails to our business address, claiming either:
1) We have gained control of your computer department and will shut you down unless you give XYZ bitcoin
or
2) I have recordings from your webcam and will send them out, along with a list of sites you have been visiting to your entire customer email list unless ... etc.
Of course, it was utter nonsense. So we always ignored them.
It's playing on guilt. Some people might feel guilty over really trivial things, that aren't worth paying the blackmail but many victims feel alone and without any guidance.
Click to expand...
Yup, the problem is either that the victim has been tricked into sending compromising photos (as with the poor Austrian youth or the British MP) or they're randomly accused of masturbating to internet porn with a spurious claim of photographic proof.

The fear of others being shown the images gives the blackmailer the power.

They're not catching ME out. I have gaffer tape over my camera. :bthumbup:
 
It always seemed to me that the best way to combat such obnoxious scams (aside from catching the perpetrators and pushing them into a big blender) is to simply de-stigmatise sex stuff.

Most humans are carnal creatures and fueled by lust, sloth, gluttony, wrath and so on (I think LaVey was on the money here), so we should embrace that reality as a mature society. I've long resolved that guilt and shame are useless emotions. If someone wanted to share my porn habits with others, go ahead. Watching porn isn't shameful. Blackmail, however, is repugnant.
 
There was an advice column in the Guardian where people could ask for readers' opinions on their problems.
One was from a woman whose partner had shared glamour photos of her online. Nothing kinky, just lingerie/nude.

However, people in their small community had seen the photos and she was embarrassed everywhere she went. People found it hilarious. They'd giggle or ask if she'd done any posing lately.

As a veteran of many self-inflicted humiliations I had sound advice to offer: damage limitation.
Ignore the first comment each time then if the person persisted, roll the eyes and say 'Are you still going on about THAT?' and change the subject.
Worked for me. Many times. :bthumbup:
 
Can't imagine having a brain so gauche to raise embarrassing stuff directly to someone. Oof. Some people.
 
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/...9.xcjVGtMEHMEJjTk8lXMstQsKBEiTptkaihS8ip3VyGA

It was early 2022 when analysts at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) noticed a frightening pattern. The US nonprofit has fielded online-exploitation cybertips since 1998, but it had never seen anything like this.

Hundreds of tips began flooding in from across the country, bucking the trend of typical exploitation cases. Usually, older male predators spend months grooming young girls into sending nude photos for their own sexual gratification. But in these new reports, teen boys were being catfished by individuals pretending to be teen girls—and they were sending the nude photos first. The extortion was rapid-fire, sometimes occurring within hours. And it wasn’t sexually motivated; the predators wanted money. The tips were coming from dozens of states, yet the blackmailers were all saying the same thing:
“I’m going to ruin your life.”
“I’m going to make it go viral.”
“Answer me quickly. Time is ticking.”
“I have what I need to destroy your life.”
In January 2022 the center received 100 reports of financially motivated sexual extortion. In February it was 173. By March, 259. The numbers were trending up so quickly and the script was so similar that the analysts reported it directly to Lauren Coffren, the executive director of the center’s exploited children division. “The bad actors were so fast and so ruthless,” Coffren says. Last year, after the center asked social media platforms to start tracking the crime, NCMEC received more than 20,000 such reports.

The scam, which the FBI calls sextortion, has become one of the fastest-growing crimes targeting children in the US, according to the agency. In an 18-month period ending in March 2023, the FBI says, at least 20 minors, primarily boys, killed themselves after falling victim to the scam. (Seven more sextortion-related suicides have been reported since then, the latest in January.) The crime is “just out of control,” says Mark Civiletto, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s Lansing, Michigan, office. “This is something that’s touching every neighborhood across the country.” ETC ETC

The Ogoshi and Shanu alleged crime rings are the modus operandi of Nigeria’s Yahoo Boys, according to a January report written by Paul Raffile, an analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. Nicknamed after the Yahoo.com emails they used to swindle thousands of unsuspecting Westerners into sending money, often posing as Nigerian princes, the Yahoo Boys are a group of digitally savvy con men who design new scams and encourage others to copy them.
Raffile found hundreds of instructional videos on TikTok and YouTube about how to blackmail teens. They were posted by young men in Nigeria who used the hashtags #YahooBoysFormat and #BlackmailFormat. The how-to guides advised targeting, or “bombing,” American high schools and sports teams to make friends with as many kids as possible from the same community. One of Jordan’s football teammates was a mutual friend of Dani Robertts’, which made her account appear legitimate.

https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Yahoo-Boys_1.2.24.pdf
 
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Here is a research article into the PUSSY IN BIO phenomenon. Very interesting:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/art...n-bio-porn-spam-on-x.html?ref=wheresyoured.at

The last big trend in adult marketing on X, SocialManipulator said, was throwing resources behind bigger accounts in hopes of getting top-ranked replies to popular posts, a tactic that’s been complicated somewhat by X’s new paid verification system, which prioritizes subscribers over other users (there are also plenty of spammers with Blue Checks, of course). PIB spam is a bit of a throwback — a classic spam campaign bolstered by modern tools and slightly different spam economics. “Things like these come and go every six months,” he said. Before “░M░Y░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░,” he recalled, it was “Netflix and F U C K M E.”

“People made a killing off that.”

Dmitry, an adult marketer turned game developer, suggested that PIB-dating-site spam is an amusing but misleading phenomenon — a primitive, low-value play that happens to be unusually memeable. These days, he said, spam on X is all about OnlyFans. More accurately, it’s all about OnlyFans agencies: companies that run OnlyFan accounts that are staffed and automated to talk simultaneously to dozens of users, who are led to believe they are talking to real models, not male operators in, say, Poland. “Every guy has three monitors, three chats at a time,” Dmitry said in a Telegram call. “The girlfriend experience costs $100 a month. There’s huge money in ‘dating.’” It’s an OnlyFans problem overflowing to X, and short of a sitewide ban, it’s not feasible for X to adjudicate which accounts are real on another major platform.

Anecdotally, Dmitry is right: Spam replies from OnlyFans agencies are rapidly crowding out PIB posters in replies across the platform with similarly suggestive but somewhat more humanlike messages that appear to lead to a real OnlyFans account, while PIB posts, though still breaking through, are getting filtered aggressively. Musk’s X, Dmitry said, has proved to be a solid source of raw traffic — that is, new OnlyFans followers — as has Reddit, while Instagram is useful only later down the line for closing the deal. As crude as it looks, all the porny, botty spam on X, he said, “is so visible because it works.”
 
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