I RECORDED YOU! Email Scammer Help

[#1]

I have received seven spam emails informing me that they have knowledge of my downloading illegal adult videos and images.

Again they want 500 in crypto currency - whatever that is or my family and friends will be told and I can expect a knock on the door from the local constabulary.

I can understand how some vulnerable people could be frightened by this thinking their PC has downloaded this stuff without their knowledge.

What I find a little scary is that my full name and email address was added but an address I haven't lived at for a few years. I checked the email addresses in the various spam messages on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ with "Good news — no pwnage found".

I deleted these spam emails on 9th October, the day I got them, so will let you know what happens on the 23rd

[#2]

Just to add a bit to the previous replies, those type of spam/blackmail emails have been around for some time and the best think is just to ignore and delete them.  They seem to work on the principle of buying email addreeses in bulk from somewhere and then doing a flood of threats.  From their point of view, they only need one recipient to bite to make it worth their while.

[#3]

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@madswitcher wrote:

the best think is just to ignore and delete them. 

 Unless you’re using a text mail reader it could be too late as you’ve probably confirmed your existence.

[#4]

@Champnet  That is why, although I don’t get that many spam mails these days, I still run everything via MWP.

[#5]

There's a lot of info on the 'net. And data gets married up (by whatever means can be used in the darker places). This can result in a set of data which superficially adds to the veracity of the bulk mailings. It is mostly 'scare' tactics.

Crypto currencies (bitcoin being the primary version, other examples being ethereum and dogecoin) are decentralised and not tied to a country or their banking system (bar when you have to buy or sell some, because that is hard cash) and fairly anonymous. Which is why the n'er-do-wells like them.

Since the cryptocurrencies rely on (unbreakable) encryption people who have invested in them have sometimes lost a lot of their investments when they lose the encryption key(s) for whatever reason (hardware failure with insuffient backups, being hacked, tricked, lost password, etc.). My heart bleeds for them. (n.b. some irony may be present).

Plus there are dodgy people peddling new cryptocurrencies which don't really exist (vapourware).

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cryptocurrency.asp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

[#6]

so my random question now is

if you sign into webmail.plus.net  and catch the emails before thunderbird downloads them, and mark them as Junk, apart from moving them to another folder it doesn't stop them in the future.. is there a way of creating a message forwarder in webmail.plus.net to auto move them to junk so I don't get 100's of these emails on a daily basis?

[#7]

just noticed in my plus.net mail setup for some reason I have catch all linking to my main email account.. so I've switched it off

would something this simple be the reason why I'm getting all this rubbish as it's not being filtered to the spam ?

[#8]

@ukanimal There may be options you could use in the 'spam' tab in 'Manage my Mail' in the Members Centre - don't know, because I use a different mail-filtering system.

[#9]

still getting a shed loads of these each day

I've reported as spam, as abuse, ran virus scanners, malware and addware scanners - all come back clean.

apart from phyiscally changing me email ( which is totally impractical ) I have no idea what else to do.

At the moment I've got them auto moving to trash in thunderbird and auto delete when I sign out.. but I wake up next morning and again over 30 in my in box waiting to be downloaded.. the most I've had in one go was just over 150.. yeah that was fun to delete

so if any ideas, will happy to listen

on a plus side the value they are demanding each week is going up, so these videos must a be good watch.. guess my webcam can see through paper that is covered over it..

but yep any ideas

[#10]

@ukanimal 

Whenever I get any of these 'repetitive nuisance streams' from the same source I do as you appear to have done, i.e. set up a message rule in Thunderbird, but my rule contains "Mark as read" before the "Move to deleted" action.  That way I'm not even aware of them after the rule has been created.

I wouldn't let it bother you, it certainly doesn't bother me.

[#11]

By any chance are these emails coming from the same domain/host?

[#12]

@Mav would recommend slapping your email into https://intelx.io

https://haveibeenpwned.com/ is a bit outdated with keeping up with databases etc.

[#13]

thank you one and all for kind replies, I was starting to seriously think I had been targetted as getting on average 50 a day now.. I've set them up for instant trash move, but still wonder how long they will keep coming... it does stress you out

[#14]

checked the pwned list - it's very long.. but the latest one was back in 2020.  some of the compaines I have used, the others I've never heard of. but yeah it helps to know where the info come from

one of which was a free webhosting company when I first started my websites

[#15]

got a new version now

YOUR DEVICE AND EMAIL HAS BEEN COMPROMISED CHECK THIS MESSAGE NOW!

so with both combined in the last 48 hrs I've had 225 of them sent to me..

one day this rubbish might stop, but cannot see if for now, I've had over 2,000 since I started this post.. and yet still no video has been shared..