Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Very unpleasant spam emails
Have now had two, separated by weeks, effectively demanding money by menace (want to be paid in bitcoin!!) because the scammer knows one of my passwords, which I've now changed. One also made explicit suggestions (untrue) about material I had on my PC, webcam etc. Also said don't try contacting the police as I've covered my tracks well, blah blah.
Just raising this here as I find this such a helpful forum. Of course I haven't responded but I haven't seen this approach to fraud discussed in papers, etc.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Hi Ros, Sorry to hear that you’re being subjected to these mails. It sounds like you’re responding very wisely. It might be worth blacklisting the senders email address (or the whole domain if it’s a private one). Your email provider should have a help page on how to do that.
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Permalink Reply by Roslyn Byfield on
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Thanks, Hugh... I thought it was worth posting here as no doubt I am not the only one but interesting I have so far not seen this one covered in other articles about spamming...
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Yes, certainly worth posting. Thanks for sharing. The less traction these nasty little parasites get the better.
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I've had dozens of these over the last couple of months. One of the benefits of using different passwords is being able to recognise when stuff like this is a scam, because even though it *was* one of my (older, widely-used) passwords it had never been used for the account they were claiming to have hacked.
You can enter your email address at https://haveibeenpwned.com/ (it's totally legit, google if unsure) which will tell you what data breaches your email and password were compromised in. In my case it listed Adobe, Dropbox, LastFM, and LinkedIn. Quite extensive.
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Permalink Reply by Dan77 on
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This makes interesting viewing, from the BBC. These are just scams and don't be unduly worried is the message, I think
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/stories-46323625/what-happened-when-s...
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Permalink Reply by EMC2 on
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My Mrs has had several recently too - one was made to appear as if it was from her email but went into her spam folder. Looking at the email header it appeared to have originated in the Dublin area, the previous one from Kenya - Ian is right, her email/some passwords appears to have been hacked in six different data breaches.
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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Obviously, English is not his first language. Given the sentence construction and the overuse of exclamation marks I would suggest India.
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I've had a variety of these. As I use unique email addresses (and passwords obviously) it's possible to see where they come from and work out which accounts have been compromised.
All the spam emails have been coming in to a couple of email addresses and the password they mentioned is unique to that too.
The plan is that those who use the same password for multiple accounts will see that password and think their system has been compromised rather than just one website which you used it on. They will also try logging into common services (email accounts, banking, etc) using that combination of username and password.
Obviously you shouldn't repeat passwords across multiple accounts and, if you want to go the extra step, you can use multiple emails for different accounts too. For gmail for example https://gizmodo.com/how-to-use-the-infinite-number-of-email-address...
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Thanks to everyone for these responses. I don't wish it on anyone but glad I am not the only one. These are so intrusive and nasty. These perpetrators must have a very unpleasant mindset.
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That's useful to know but most of us won't have seen it and I think their content is behind a paywall? I had another today. Apart from the sheer nastiness of them, it seems very sad that this is how these people are trying to make money.
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Coincidentally, a friend told me this week they'd been getting exactly the same kind of spam and had, as you did, chosen to ignore the threats. Scant comfort, obviously, but perhaps reassuring to know that others are being bullied as well as you. With mega-hacks, such as TalkTalk, hotel groups and others recently, it's not very surprising if scammers are trying it on in hopes of hitting at least one target.
Is it worth contacting or forwarding the e-mails to Action Fraud (www.actionfraud.police.uk/report-phishing) ? I know it's sometimes seen as "In-action Fraud", because it's understaffed and overworked, but in theory multiple reports of similar fraud are aggregated, to (perhaps) give the police and cyber-crime agencies enough to investigate and stop further activity.
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