Sextortion scam emails mislead victims into thinking that the attacker owns a recording of victim’s screen and camera and that recording contains images or videos of the victim in sexually explicit situations. The attackers use this claim of a recording to blackmail the victim into paying the attacker. The attacker threatens to publicly disclose the recording.
OVERVIEW
▪ A large-scale “sextortion” campaign is targeting internet users since February 2021. In these sextortion campaign users were threatened by scammers to leak their private videos and moments in public.
▪ Sextortion spamming is a lucrative business and scammers will continue to send bulk spam emails that try to extort money through bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
▪ Scammers takes advantage of the increased use of video conferencing services during the remote working periods and falsely claiming to have accessed a user's device, microphone, and camera.
▪ The sextortion email campaign started in back 2018. All these sextortion campaigns are not run by single individuals. Cyber-criminals use botnet infrastructures and scammers are leveraging the infrastructure for mass email spreading. Sextortion infrastructure nowadays is designed with financial features that handle the creation of cryptocurrency wallet addresses and handle the financial revenue streams within this ecosystem.