Scam extortion emails prey on fear to get you to pay up: "Don't try to escape"
Scammers are deploying a disturbing new tactic to try to take your money by preying on your fear through threats of extortion.
"You do not know me, however, I know you very well," Carole Mancini read from the emails she recently received from an unknown sender.
Mancini, a British transplant who now resides in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, said she was alarmed at the amount of personal information that was included in the ominously worded message.
"Don't try to escape from this," the email said. "You have no idea what I'm capable of in Doylestown."
The sender claimed to have malware installed on Mancini's computer and access to her webcam and personal information, which they would expose to her friends, family, colleagues and neighbors unless she paid $2,000 in Bitcoin.
"The fact they had my name spelled correctly, and my address, my phone number, there was a feeling of familiarity which was most unwelcome," Mancini said. "The feeling was whoever had written it knew me, was watching me, had intimate knowledge of what I do."
The FBI says these types of extortion, or blackmail, scams are on the rise. The emails often read similar to, "You've been treading on thin ice with your browsing habits," or "I've got footage of you doing embarrassing things in your house."
Blackmail, or extortion, emails can include the following:
- Urgent deadline
- Awkward wording
- Generic language
The scammers use readily available information about you online, like your address or even a street view image of your home, to make it seem real, Dan Ackerman, editor-in-chief of Micro Center News, explained in a recent interview on "CBS Mornings."
"No matter how savvy you are, you're going to say, 'Is this real, is this me,' and the good news is that 99.9% of the time it's not," Ackerman said. "If they had something on you, they would give you a screengrab of a shot from inside your house or some detail about yourself and your life that's not just publicly available."
If you receive what you suspect is a blackmail email, Ackerman advises:
- Do not respond
- Do not pay scammers any money
- Report the email to your email provider as spam or phishing
AARP says scammers send out these threats indiscriminately using big batches of email addresses that they likely obtained on the dark web from data breaches.
Mancini saw through the scam almost immediately and reported it to the Bucks County Department of Consumer Protection.
"I thought 'Oh, bloody hell, this is just ridiculous,'" she said. "How dare they write this crap to me?"
But given her long history working in elder care, she said she felt compelled to share her experience because she feared others could be vulnerable to a scheme like this.
"I know a lot of people who would be very intimidated," she said.
Do you have a money question, a consumer issue, or a scam story you want to share? Email InYourCorner@cbs.com.
