Got the following mail yesterday, here goes.... Well, first of all I don't have a webcam and secondly I don't visit porn sites. So he is a liar. Did some research and found https://haveibeenpwned.com/ By entering your email you can see if you are in the list of hacked websites and if you are the advice is to change the passwords you are using because sooner or later it's your turn. I was mentioned 4 times. I thought it was just an innocent scam but even before the dead line of 48 hours he hacked my Facebook account and my email, both became inaccessible. He lied again. You really can't trust these guys now can you? Meanwhile both my Facebook and email are working again by changing passwords.
Use a password manager and masked emails for every service, such that if one set of credentials is exposed it's just that one set. I'm on all sorts of these lists, due to the nature of my work.
I found quite a few messages like that in my spam folder. Yeah, they got a password that I use for generic forums when I don't really care if someone hacks me. My email password (the one they said they had) is a honking great jumble of numbers and letters. Then there's the issue that I'm not exactly a regular fixture at porn sites, and you won't have captured anything on my webcam because I have a piece of tape permanently over the camera on my tablet and disable the webcam on my laptop. Aside from that, good try. I guess enough people figure it's safer to pay the $500 (if I recall my scammers had various requests ranging from about $1000-1500) than to risk their contacts getting compromising videos. But then one good thing about this age of deepfakes is that when anyone with the inclination can create a fake video, just about anything can be denied. So even if the scammers did have the video they claim to have you can just say it's a deepfake and ignore it.
I guess you don't need very many people to send you $500-1500 (you know, just to be safe) before it beats working for a living.
Just got a couple of visual voicemails from Cal. that warned if they did not hear from me they would be forced to take legal action - press #1. Recording was broken up and lacked any details. I had just woken and was a bit confused. It's a scam of course and if you press 1 it verifies your number to them. Live and learn.
We've been getting these for years now. Original ones were supposed calls from Canada Revenue Agency (your IRS) then branched out to other ominous agencies. Then they started in Chinese and the quality decreased rapidly.
My social security number was suspended for fraudulent activity. Seven times in one day. I thought that was impressive. At the time I didn't even have a social security number.
Some of the CRA ones we'd get were hilarious as they make these claims that you need to respond etc., and then stating that if you don't respond then by a certain time, well, "Good Luck!".
It is good to see the IRS moving with the times. You never used to be able to pay a tax liability with a Target gift card, for instance.
Oh the CRA, who themselves act in such shady ways that it's nigh impossible to tell if they're actually reaching out or if it's a scam.