Don’t send them any money. Nothing bad will happen to you.
How do I know? Well, for one thing, I’ve received several of these emails throughout the years. I’ve never sent any money. Nothing bad happened. For good measure, two scammers tried this tactic with me on the dating apps. When they revealed themselves, I just blocked them. Again, nothing bad happened.
As reported here, the latest iteration of this scam will use your name, and attach photos of your house to give an air of believability to the threat. After all, if they know where you live, what else might they know about you? Right?
The emails also contain nice touches, like the claim that they’ve hacked your operating system, or your hardware, to spy on you. They’ll also claim that they’ve recorded you pleasuring yourself to porn and will release that information to your contact list.
OMG! You must send them money now! Right?
Wrong.
Your Autistic Life is supported by readers like you. Use one of the links below to support my writing! Thank you.
The only real thing in all this is that they have your name, your email address, and a picture of your house. This is public information. Everything else is bluff. The email is written in a way that makes it easily reusable. They just need to change the email address, the name, and the picture, and the same email is ready to be sent to someone else.
If they had truly hacked your computer in the way they said they did, it would be trivial to add a file to your file system that says that you’ve been hacked. However, this never happens. There’s no actual proof that you’ve been hacked, just a claim that you were. Also, if they have a recording of you pleasuring yourself to porn, why are they not attaching proof? That’s because it is all hot air.
What happens if you comply? Well, the first effect is that you lose money. I also have this unproven theory that this marks you as someone to continue scamming. Why should they stop milking you when you’ve already proved to be a compliant victim?
What happens if you do not comply?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
Scammers are after the low-hanging fruit. By not complying, you’ve put yourself out of reach of them. In fact, you were not hacked, and they do not have your list of contacts. Even if they did have it, writing the email would take time, and they would most likely have to create out of thin air some compromising picture of you. (I don’t think AI is a game changer in this regard.)
They’d also most likely be burning the account they are using to send the email. No matter how convincing the email may be, people would be reporting them as a spammer. Creating another account is not overly difficult, but it does have a cost of time, if not money.
When you do not comply, every action they might take to make true on their threat is more work for them. It is a cost, without a benefit. If they were ever to put their threat to execution, you wouldn’t come back to hand them the money, would you? The damage is already done! The conclusion is that it is much better for them to move on to the next potential victim.
The article I linked above says:
Many homeowners are unaware they have the option to opt out of having this information displayed publicly.
However, the article does not explain how this information can be removed. I am skeptical of this claim. Maybe some information can be removed. However, as far as I know, because I’ve been a homeowner, public information laws are such that some of this information cannot be scrubbed from the internet. This is the world we live in.
Just don’t send money to them, okay?
Leave a Reply