Sextortion cases in the USA: Criminals send pictures from the surrounding area

A new sextortion campaign is currently doing the rounds: Criminals claim to have videos of people masturbating. At the same time, send a photo of the house or the area where the recipient of the message lives. Several readers from the USA reported this to Krebs on the subject of security.

Advertisement

The criminals contact the victims via email and claim to have infected a webcam with the Pegasus spyware in order to obtain the videos. However, this is not true. In the sextortion emails, the victims were addressed by name and the perpetrators threatened to release the masturbation videos and all of their contacts if they did not pay a ransom in Bitcoin worth around $2,000.

To make the scenario seem more realistic, the perpetrators supplement their blackmailing emails with images from online map services such as Google Maps.

The address was also included in the blackmail letter and it was suggested that if payment was not made, the perpetrators would “visit the victim in person”. To put even more pressure on the victim, they set a deadline of 24 hours. The perpetrators also threatened to publish the video material immediately if the victims shared the emails with others.

Readers of Krebs on Security have already reported in the blog’s comments section that they had also received a corresponding email. Some readers also seem to have received a picture of another house or one from the neighborhood. It is still unclear which data the criminals use to find the location. It could be that the victim gets the addresses using data from previous leaks.

Anyone who receives empirical texts online should report them to the police and under no circumstances click on links or download attachments. An Australian was recently sentenced to 17 years in prison for more than 280 sextortion cases. In 180 cases, his victims were minors. He had blackmailed his victims by pretending to be in possession of intimate images of the people. If they did not share sexual content with him – for example via video chat – he threatened to send images to all friends on their contact list.

(Mack)