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Saturday, September 14, 2024

SCAM UPDATE – Scammers Including Pictures of Your Home

Threatening emails with a picture of your home. Several news sources have recently been reporting that scammers are sending threatening emails that include personal information and a picture of the recipient’s home. The Bellevue Police Department issued an alert earlier in September stating that the emails often contain home addresses, full names and a picture. Other sources have noted that the emails contain a picture of a house.

The emails claim to be from a hacker who hacked into the recipient’s computer and collected the recipient visiting adult websites. Sometimes the emails claim that the recipient is being watched and tracked by Pegasus spyware, an app produced be an Israeli company that sells the app to governments, law enforcement, and militaries around the world. The scammer tries to give the impression that they have a lot of information about the recipient and if they do not pay a ransom, often with Cryptocurrency, they will release the information to the recipient’s friends and family.

The information about the recipient contained in the email is easily accessed in the open on the internet. A picture of the recipient’s house can be freely obtained on Google Maps’ Street View mode.

The emails represent a new “feature” by sextortion scammers to jolt you into paying them to “suppress” incriminating information.

Of course, if you receive a sextortion email like this, don’t click on any links or attachments. Report it to the FBI’s www.IC3.gov website. Also, to avoid sextortion emails, never send compromising images of yourself to anyone and turn off (and/or cover) any web cameras when you are not using them

 

MyNorthwest KIRO Newsradio:

https://mynorthwest.com/3986583/bellevue-under-attack-from-ongoing-bitcoin-scam/

 

Verify:

https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/scams-verify/have-you-received-a-threatening-email-asking-for-bitcoin-payment-with-a-photo-of-your-home-its-a-scam/536-6f618b1e-7fa0-4da6-8442-bffb097cbee9?s=09

 

Krebs on Security:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/09/sextortion-scams-now-include-photos-of-your-home/

 

Authorities prosecute cyber criminals. We usually hear about scams and how it can be impossible to prosecute the criminals behind the fraud much less return any funds stolen from the victim. Here are two recent examples of authorities investigating and prosecuting international cyber criminals.

Two Nigerian brothers were convicted of targeting a 17-year-old male in a sextortion scheme that resulted in the teenager’s suicide in April 2024. Samuel Ogoshi, 24, and Samson Ogoshi, 21, from Lagos, were sentenced to 17 years and six months in prison in the U.S. for luring Jordan DeMay of Marquette, Michigan, by pretending to be a pretty girl, flirting with DeMay to convince him to send explicit pictures of himself then blackmailing him. John DeMay committed suicide less than six hours after the brothers started talking to him on Instagram. 38 other US victims identified as targeted by the men with 13 of them being minors.

The second case occurred in the United Kingdom. On August 30, 2024, the National Crime Agency (NCA) announced that three men pleaded guilty to operating an online service that helped attackers intercept one-time passcodes (OTPs) used to authenticate entry into many online accounts. Callum Picari, 22, from Hornchurch, Essex; Vijayasidhurshan Vijayanathan, 21, from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire; and Aza Siddeeque, 19, from Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire hosted a website called OTP Agency that intercepted OTPs used in Multi-Factor Authentication schemes in a cybercrime as a service enterprise. Scammers would steal or purchase on the dark web someone’s bank account credentials, phone number, and name. The service would initiate an automated phone call to the target to alert them to supposed unauthorized activity on their account. The phone call would prompt the target to enter the OTP that they received via SMS text that the scammers initiated when they tried to log into the account. Any codes that were transmitted via the phone call were shared with the scammers to complete the log in process.

For more detail about both cases check out the links below.

 

BBC:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr7rxpdyz9yo

 

Krebs on Security:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/09/owners-of-1-time-passcode-theft-service-plead-guilty/

 

 

 

 

 

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