Remember Those Extortion Phishing Scams That I Told You About? Well The Scammers Made A Lot Of Money From Them
Over the last few months I’ve been telling you about a scam where a scammer sends someone an email claiming that they have evidence of you watching porn and that they will delete it if you pay them in bitcoin. Then this scam got a bit more scary when the hackers started to serve up your password to prove that they were not lying. According to Motherboard, those who fell for that scam have netted the scammers about $500,000 based on research done by security company Banbreach who looked at the bitcoin wallets used by the scammers:
Banbreach looked at around 770 wallets in total, according to a spreadsheet the company shared with Motherboard. The majority of those, around 540, did not receive any funds. But the remaining ~230 had over 1,000 transactions, receiving a total of around 70.8 BTC.
At today’s exchange rate, 70.8 BTC works out to just under $500,000. Not a trivial amount of money. But according to the company, this is likely a conservative estimate and the actual dollar value that the scammers scored is likely much higher. Considering that these scammers are using information from other hacks and are doing mass emails based on that, the return on investment is high given the skill level to pull this off is low. And chances are, the money that they’re making is only coming from 1% – 3% of people actually responding to this which shows that it doesn’t take a lot of victims for scammers to make a lot of money from something like this.
September 26, 2018 at 10:00 am
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October 8, 2018 at 11:44 am
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October 19, 2018 at 1:40 pm
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October 20, 2018 at 9:00 am
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March 16, 2020 at 9:01 am
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