New Email Scam Includes Pictures of Your House. Don’t Fall For It.
New Email Scam Includes Pictures of Your House. Don’t Fall For It.
You may have arrived at this post because you received an email with an attached PDF from a purported hacker who is demanding payment or else they will send compromising information—such as pictures sexual in nature—to all your friends and family. You’re searching for what to do in this frightening....
I've gotten a few of these, but I just moved so it only included Google maps images of my old apartment, and I guess the data scrape didn't get my phone number, so it included language like "I bet you wouldn't like it if I called you at 0000000000, would you?"
I'm savvy enough to laugh and delete, but I'm sure this would be very effective against some older Americans.
Yeah, I definitely knew it was fake when they called it a "beautiful neighborhood". My friend did you even look at the picture you sent?
AI might improve their messaging soon
Good. I could use a house.
This is so good. Congratulations.
nice setup, by the way
thanks man, but how did you get a picture of my room ?!?
Watching me while I'm browsing the net?
I especially like when they tell me my address lol, as if I’m supposed to be scared into responding.
Gahhh they figured out how to use a publicly available database!
Just you wait till they figure out what the phone book is!
Ha! I don't even have a house!
I keep kind of hoping I get this one. I'm ace, so I definitely haven't been watching porn of any kind, and my house has changed dramatically since the last time google came by, so it would just be entertaining. But then I see people on nextdoor all freaked out that "someone has pictures of their house," and it makes me wish for a large, extremely targeted sinkhole to open up under all these scammers.
Ah yes, one of the neat advantages of being ace, easily being able to ignore people claiming to know you've watched anything sexual. Either because you never have, or because it'd have to be incredibly specific to ever be right, depending on how being Asexual affects you.
Hi, can you send me copy of the video too? You have me email address.
It's all good.
I'll just call it a deepfake and get on with my life.
Nothing deep about it.
I wonder what those do with people who live in apartment buildings, lol.
It will show street view of the building or road
You have no idea what I'm capable of in <<City>>. 🤣
Such an obvious mail merge. I'd imagine there is a way to automate pulling the Google Street View images and pasting them in the document, but I don't know how it's done.
But yeah, I got version 1 from that article and just shook my head at such a pathetic extortion attempt. I was like, "C'mon now...everyone in my life knows I'm a polyamorous hedonist. I could sell some of them whatever video you could ever possibly have of me that you definitely don't. 😂"
How much are you charging?
Seventy thousand dollhairs.
how do they know your house tho thats what am wondering
They likely buy leaked data that would include things like your full name and email, perhaps an address. Even if an address isn't there, legal data brokers often have your address for a small payment anyways. From there they likely use something like Google Street view.
I worked for an ISP that uses Openreach's infrastructure in the UK. In order to make changes to customer installations or repairs we had to call an Openreach Contact Centre. These were basically big call centres in India. Many of my customers got contacted by scammers from India shortly after me contacting Openreach about their accounts using information like their address, contact details and information about the work they were receiving, and demanding things like card details to ensure the work went forward.
It was obvious Indian workers in those call centres were taking pictures of customer account details and using that info to scam those customers, but my company refused to do anything about it because we "lacked evidence" and just told us to let customers know any communication about their accounts would come directly from us and we'd never ask for any card details etc.
I'm certain any other companies, whether UK or US, that use centralised admin from India and similar places with poor security will be plagued with these exact same issues.
ohhh
If you are a homeowner, property transaction records are public information in the US. Plenty of data brokers collate from the numerous city/county databases for those who only know your name.
Oh
I got this one
Me too. They had an old address I lived at five years ago. I'm shaking, I'm shaking.
That's the way to win. Never fill in your actual address. Just keep them trying and make up new fake addresses as soon as you can.
I got example 1 verbatim about a month ago complete with Google street view picture of my house. Jokes on them, all of my porn viewing is on an ancient tablet that does not have a front facing camera.
I got one a couple years ago that included an old password I had used to use. It was sent to my work email but because it had that info in it I did legit get scared...until it said it recorded me jerking it over my webcam. I don't have a webcam.
I found out at least 2 other coworkers got similar emails so me thinks a shitty work vendor got hacked
For me this would not work. I have my own domain and give out like me-authy@example.com So if the email is sent to that I wound just know who leaked my email adress. Change email and ban everything to to the old adress. I never get spam this way.
Thats pretty clever. I might have to start doing that.
Do you send all outgoing email from individualized addresses too?
I do the same as you (raccoon.uber@ball.com), but all my outgoing emails come from (raccoon@ball.com), it worked great for about 5 years until people with me in their address book started getting hacked.
I can in Thunderbird but I don't reply to companies. They have no reply email adress. Like here is your order number or there is our latest campaign. I use customer chat for help or company have internal message system like banks. In general I like to avoid using email due to the protocol design.
It's really not a hard screening algorithm: do I know this person, or have I done business with this company? OK, does the URL check out? Then I'll respond to that person's email or go log into that company's website, not using a link from the message I received. Otherwise, it's spam.
Also, there are no pictures of my dick online, or of me having sex. Anyone claiming otherwise doesn't know me. Nice and easy.
My wife got that one twice already. Not very bright people.