Sextortion Scammers Make Off with $500,000 in Bitcoin (BTC)

Sextortion Scammers Make Off with $500,000 in Bitcoin (BTC)

Despite the good intentions associated with them, cryptocurrencies are often used by criminals and are increasingly demanded in ransom.

According to a report by Motherboard, scammers have made around half a million US dollars from the sextortion e-mails doing the rounds earlier this summer. The extortionists claimed to have videos obtained through hacked webcams of people doing “nasty things” while watching porn.

Cybersecurity experts have found that this particular scam has been quite profitable, without that much of an effort required from the scammers.

“What is worrying is that scammers were able to siphon off $500,000 from old passwords dumps, with very little effort,” Suman Kar, CEO of cybersecurity company Banbreach, told Motherboard.

In order to obtain the figure, Banbreach looked at 770 different Bitcoin wallets it collected by looking at social media posts, news media reports, and comments on the scam. The majority of the wallets – 540 – did not receive any Bitcoins, but the remaining 230 had more than 1,000 transactions and received around 70.8. BTC, which at that time amounted to around $500,000.

Most likely, however, the figure is a conservative estimate because Banbreach has probably missed some of the addresses.

Kar told Motherboard it was hard to establish with certainty how the scammers got those old passwords, but they were most likely obtained from data breaches of LinkedIn and the Anti-Public Combo list, which is a collection of various data caches that have turned up in searches in the breach notification site Have I Been Pwned.

Other widely covered recent scams include the notorious WannaCry malware, which also demanded ransom payments in Bitcoin, and the “famous person giving away Bitcoins and Ethers” hoax on Twitter. In addition to the sextortion e-mails, fraudsters have also used snail mail letters sent to allegedly cheating husbands to get Bitcoin in exchange for keeping the secret.

Towards the end of July, the author of this article also got such a sextortion e-mail, demanding that $2,750 in Bitcoin be sent to a certain address. The missive started off with the scammer claiming to have one of the “secret passwords,” giving an old one the author used years ago for some websites. 

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