Gardai in Laois are warning about a Sextortian scam – the practice of extorting money or sexual favours from someone by threatening to reveal evidence of their sexual activity.
This scam email is actually quite common and is very threatening in nature.
Crime Prevention Officer for Laois-Offaly Sergeant Graham Kavanagh advises if you should receive an email such as this either mark the email as spam/phishing (if available) or delete the email is the best course of action.
He said: “There should be no interaction with the sender at all. The criminal has no video.
“Do not ever send money to these people. If you receive a similar email and it is causing you worry then please talk to someone you trust.
“The emails typically go as follows:
“I am a hacker who has access to your operating system. I also have full access to your account.
“I’ve been watching you for a few months now. The fact is that you were infected with malware through an adult site that you visited.
“If you are not familiar with this, I will explain. Trojan Virus gives me full access and control over a computer or other device.
“This means that I can see everything on your screen, turn on the camera and microphone, but you do not know about it.
“I also have access to all your contacts and all your correspondence. Why your antivirus did not detect malware?
“Answer: My malware uses the driver, I update its signatures every 4 hours so that your antivirus is silent.
“I made a video showing how you satisfy yourself in the left half of the screen, and in the right half you see the video that you watched.
“With one click of the mouse, I can send this video to all your emails and contacts on social networks.
“I can also post access to all your e-mail correspondence and messengers that you use.
“If you want to prevent this, transfer the amount of $500 to my bitcoin address (if you do not know how to do this, write to Google: “Buy Bitcoin”).
“After receiving the payment, I will delete the video and you will never hear me again.
“I give you 50 hours (more than 2 days) to pay. I have a notice reading this letter, and the timer will work when you see this letter.
“Filing a complaint somewhere does not make sense because this email cannot be tracked like my bitcoin address. I do not make any mistakes.
“If I find that you have shared this message with someone else, the video will be immediately distributed.”
So the safest course of action is to delete.
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