BEWARE: BITCOIN SCAMMERS DUPING PORN WATCHERS

Porn viewers are the recent targets of online scammers that attempts to blackmail the viewers with the aim of extorting a sum equivalent to $1,900. To make it even more difficult to trace, the scammers are only accepting payments from bitcoins.

How Are They Doing This?
The scammers are using malware to obtain compromising footage of the porn viewers. The scammers take footage unknowingly via the victim’s webcams. The footage, many times obtained from different parts of the world is taken when the porn footage is playing on the victim’s computer. The scammers take this footage by accessing the victim's webcam while they were watching porn on their computer.

Once taken, a blackmailing email is then sent to the intended victim. Those emails reveal the password of the victim's computer to show as a proof that the victim's computer has been hacked. Often, such passwords are obtained through breaching company data files. However, there is no surety that the scammers have the access to victim's webcam and the footage actually exists or not.

Email Details
The blackmailing email sent by the scammers state that remote desktop program (RDP) has been installed in the victim's computer. This means that the scammers can be able to access the victim's webcam from a remote location and record video footage of victim, and your family and can even access the victim's entire list of contacts.

Then the scammers start threatening the victim by claiming that the video footage will be sent to all of his contacts if the demanded ransom will not to given to the scammers within the given time.

But the emails sent by the scammers are normally vague on the details pertaining to the porn sites that the victim may or may not have visited. Along with that, the email does states that the footage will be sent to nine contacts of the victim just to show as a proof that the footage does exist.

The fact that the scammers are sending these emails is just to embarrass the victim and there is a strong chance that the threat may not be real but only a bluff. Then the scammers demand victims around $1900 worth of BTC which should be sent to a certain BTC address as the price for keeping the footage a secret.

The main reason why scammers are demanding ransom in the form of BTC is because it is difficult to trace bitcoin as compared to cash or any other wire payments, and the ease in which it can be traded into other alternative currencies, e.g., ethereum, monero or Zcash. The anonymous and volatile nature of cryptocurrencies makes it difficult to trace, which makes it more preferable than PayPal or wire transfer payment methods.

According to Professor Emin Sirer from Cornell University, this practice is known as cryptoblackmail, and is something that has been on the rise thanks to the increase in the number of people using cryptocurrencies.

The professor goes on to urge victims not to attempt to negotiate or pay the scammers. This is because this could be a bluff, based on past incidences similar to this one.