The world of cryptocurrency has seen plenty of scams being run to yield several benefits. Hackers and cybercriminals have targeted YouTube channels and Twitter of prominent handles of well-known personalities to make their scam successful. Now a Bitcoin sextortion scam has come to the fore which is making the most. And some innocent people just fell for the scam.
A victim last night sent 0.15 Bitcoin to the scammer, or $1,744. The scam, which has been operational since 2015, has now racked up $114,649 from 203 payments, the average of which is $564.
A Twitter bot run by Whale Alert, Scam Alerts, which functions in a way to keep the users posted about any kind of scam first highlighted about the sextortion scam. For the uninitiated, sextortion refers to the broad category of sexual exploitation in which abuse of power is the means of coercion, as well as to the category of sexual exploitation in which threatened release of sexual images or information is the means of coercion.
To carry the Bitcoin sextortion, scammers have more often emails claiming that they’ve filmed them fondling their most sensitive externalities and will release the information to the world unless they pay them a princely sum.
“To back up their claim, scammers often include personal information and a password used by the victim, obtained from data leaks available on the dark web,” Scam Alert said in its report. The sextortion emails we receive usually contain “Decrypt4Eva123,” for example.
However, these kind of scams are not new and have been carried out quite successfully for years now.
