It’s been a while since I have written about extortion phishing scams. But three new ones have appeared and one of them is potentially dangerous.
Let’s start with the dangerous one. The scumbags behind this one are now utilizing a new extortion email campaign that claims the recipient’s phone was hacked, includes a partial phone number of the recipient, and further states that they created videos using the recipient’s webcam. Here’s an example:
@It seems that, 14, *last two digits your phone-
\You may not know me and you are probably wondering why you are getting this e mail, right?-
!actually, I setup a malware on the adult vids (porno) web-site and guess what*
@you visited this site to have fun (you know what I mean).(
^While you were watching videos, your internet browser started out functioning as a RDP (Remote Desktop)(
&having a keylogger which gave me accessibility to your screen and web cam.*
@after that, my software program obtained all of your contacts, phone and email.\
_What did I do?(
!I backuped phone. All photo, video and contacts.+
!I created a double-screen video./
&1st part shows the video you were watching (you’ve got a good taste haha . . .)$
%and 2nd part shows the recording of your web cam.=
+exactly what should you do?/
#Well, in my opinion, 809$ is a fair price for our little secret.\
=You’ll make the payment by +Bitcoin% (if you do not know this$ search !how to buy bitcoin& in Google)._
-Bitcoin^ Address:
<BITCOIN ADDRESS REDACTED>
%(It is cAsE sensitive, so copy and paste it)*
%Important:
!You have 45 hours in order to make the payment.\
%(I’ve a unique pixel in this e mail, and at this moment I know that you have read through this email message)-
\If I do not get the !BitCoins+
%I will certainly send out your video recording to all of your contacts%
@Having said that, if I receive the payment, I’ll destroy the video immidiately._
)If you need evidence, reply with “Yes!*
-If I find that you have shared this message with someone else$
)the video will be immediately distributed.=
Now the person who got this email told me that the last two digits of his phone number were accurate. Thus he wondered if he had been hacked. But I can say that after examining his computer and phone, that he had not been hacked. But clearly this is a new method to convince the recipient that they have been hacked and it has replaced displaying a password to do the same thing.
The thing is, it’s really easy to get the last two digits of someone’s phone number. The most logical way that these scammers are getting these numbers is via it may password or account recovery functionality such as the one from Gmail or the one from Microsoft. There have been data leaks in the past that only contained partial phone numbers as well, But the bottom line is that you have not been hacked.
The second is aimed at companies. It’s pretty low level and not very sophisticated. Here’s a copy of what one of my clients got:
FORWARD THIS MAIL TO WHOEVER IS IMPORTANT IN YOUR COMPANY AND CAN MAKE DECISION!
We Hacked You Infrastructure.
We Caught Possible Communication.
We Backuped Available DATA And DOCUMENTS.
That you trusting our words, we send this mail to you with YOUR account.
After analyzing documents. We see your Illegal activity. HIDING TAXES.
That we do NEXT.
I want two (2) Bitcoin
if you don’t pay fees. To my wallet Bitcoin.
<BITCOIN ADDRESS REDACTED>
We want send this Documents and Proofs to your Tax Departament.
And in this time Your network will be DDoS.
Read that in this link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack
This is our guarantee, that you don’t clean evidence and build a protection policy.
If you don’t pay by in 7 days, attack will start.
Yours service going down permanently and price to stop will increase to Four (4) BTC,
Price will go up one (1) BTC for every day of the attack.
This is not a joke.
Our attacks are extremely powerful – sometimes over 1 Tbps per second.
And we pass CloudFlare and others remote protections!
So, no cheap protection will help.
Prevent it all with just Two (2) BTC
To my wallet Bitcoin.
<BITCOIN ADDRESS REDACTED>
Pay strict sum. This is your identification. And we will know that its you.
AND YOU WILL NEVER AGAIN HEAR FROM US!
Bitcoin is anonymous, nobody will ever know
you cooperated.
Time started after open this mail.
To track the reading of a message and the actions in it, I use the facebook pixel.
Read that in this link
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/898185560232180?helpref=faq_content
There’s nothing here that is interesting. Such as passwords that the user has used, or a partial phone number like the previous scam. Thus this scam is purely trying to take advantage of the fact that a company might not have paid their taxes. And that they can track that you opened this email using Facebook Pixel. Which for the record when I examined the email it showed no evidence that Facebook Pixel was in use. #Fail. I seriously doubt that this will get this scammer anything.
Finally, there are new scams that utilize QR codes to direct you to their Bitcoin wallet so that you can pay them. The QR code has the amount that you have to pay as well which is kind of clever.
I took screenshots of the text that the recipient gets:

Below that is a QR Code that goes to a Bitcoin wallet . I am not reposting the QR code as I don’t want to give these scumbags any more time than I need to. Other than that, it’s the usual extortion phishing scam that we’ve seen for the last little while.
If you come across any of these scams, you know what to do. Simply delete them and move on with your life.
I Find Myself Involved In Dealing With Another Tech Support Scam
Posted in Commentary with tags Scam on February 17, 2021 by itnerdFrequent readers of this blog know that I have documented a couple of tech support scams in the past. For those who are not familiar with this scam, someone claiming to be from Microsoft or Apple, or perhaps an ISP claiming that your computer is broken in some way. They will then convince you to connect to them remotely so that they can control your computer and fix whatever problem they claim you have.While doing this, they will ask you for a credit card number at the very least, or at worst they will steal information off your computer so that they can commit some form of identity theft. And that doesn’t take into account the possibility that they will simply trash your computer in some way. Clearly these guys are scumbags and I truly feel that they are the lowest forms of life on Earth that need to be exterminated.
In any case, this past Monday I got an email from a 90 year old client of mine with cognitive issues who got one of these calls and completely got sucked into letting them connect to her computer and do their evil work. I dropped everything that I was doing and raced over there to see what damage was done after telling her to turn off the PC.
Upon arriving at her home, I interviewed her to find out what the sequence of events were. She apparently got a call from the scammers who were claiming to be from Microsoft and over the next half hour she fumbled her way to getting them connected to her computer. During that process the scammers got frustrated and abusive, which from my research isn’t a surprise as they want to get in, scam you and get out as quickly as possible. Then for the next hour they showed her all the “errors” that her computer. Then they made an appointment for the next day to fix all these “errors”. But due to her cognitive issues, she couldn’t give me many details. So I went about investigating her PC to see if I can figure out what they did.
I’m going to stop here for a moment and rant for a bit because scams like this makes me very, very angry. Because of her cognitive issues, she’s the perfect target for this sort of scam. I say that because according to her she has a “Microsoft” computer and from her perspective if someone from “Microsoft” calls her to help her, she should listen to them and do what they say. I’ll explain why that isn’t true in a bit. And because of her cognitive issues, I can’t get the usual amount of information for me to hunt down the scumbags behind this and expose them to the world. Which means that the people behind this one might have gotten away with this. The key word being might as I will do everything in my power to figure out who these scumbags are and expose them for what they are.
In any case, from what I can tell, they had the client download a piece of software called AnyDesk which is a commercially available piece of software that is typically used for remote access by IT help desks to help people in a company or for individuals to access a computer in their office from home. Using commercially available software is pretty typical behavior for these scammers as it adds some legitimacy to their scumbag activities and is not going to get flagged by antivirus software. I found a copy of AnyDesk in her download folder, and combined with some notes that she took and a Windows 7 (as she runs Windows 7) virtual machine, I was able to reverse engineer what they did to connect.
When you first run the application, you see this:
In the top left you will see a number which is 511 553 741. This is the code that the scammers use to connect to her computer from their copy of the software. I know this because on her notes, there was a set of numbers that I am guessing that she wrote down and then repeated to the scumbags.
The next box of interest is the “Set password unattended access…”. On her notes, I saw “can12345” which is not the most original password that I have seen. But this I assume that this is meant to set up her computer so that they can come into the computer, look around and steal stuff at will assuming the computer was on. I also noted that they had configured the program to take total control of the computer do anything they wanted.
The final box of interest is the “Install AnyDesk” box. I am going to guess that once the scammers connected, they pressed this button so that AnyDesk would be live and connected to the Internet without requiring a user to do anything. To make sure that they couldn’t do anything on that front, I uninstalled AnyDesk. I also examined the computer in a variety of ways and found no evidence that they did anything else. No backdoors, no viruses, nothing. Though I am going to be doing a second look at the computer today to make sure that there’s no other issues lurking to cause trouble. But based on my initial look at her computer I think that they might have done some sort of “dog and pony show” to make her think that there were major problem with her computer and to suck her into letting them do more.
One that that really got my interest is that they did not ask for her credit card details or her banking info. This is strange as when I typically come across these scams, the scammers try to get these details up front. I can only see three possibilities for this:
When I examine her computer again today, I will take a second look for evidence of any of this. I will post an update with what happens. But in the here and now, let me give you some advice in terms of avoiding being a victim of one of these scams. When I covered previous tech support scams that I investigated, I posted this advice which is still true today. But if you take away nothing else from this, remember that you will never, ever get a call from Apple, Google, or Microsoft to fix your computer. It will not happen. Thus if you get a call like this, hang up. That is guaranteed to make sure you are not a victim.
Expect a further update on this later today. As mentioned above, I am taking a second look to see if these scumbags did anything else, and I will be trying again to see if I can identify who they are so that I can name and shame them.
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