An email hits your inbox from an unknown sender that includes a picture of your house and address, followed by a threat: “Don’t even try to hide from this. You have no idea what I’m capable of….I’ve got footage of you doing embarrassing things in your house (nice setup, by the way).”
Sounds like a scene out of a horror film, right? Instead, it’s one of the latest phishing scams.
Like many other email and text scams, this particular extortion scheme uses specific personal information to deceive people into sending money. The email convinces people the hacker knows more about them and that they must exchange payment or Bitcoin in order to keep their information safe.
“I received a PDF over email that included my address and photo of the address and made outrageous claims about my private behavior, and claimed to have video documentation captured from spyware on my computer,” Jamie Beckland, a chief product officer at the tech company APIContext, told HuffPost. “The scammer threatened to release the video if I didn’t pay them via Bitcoin.”
If you get a similar email, here are the steps you can take to figure out if it’s a scam so you protect yourself:
Confirm the house and street imagery on Google Maps.
Many phishing emails are often riddled with grammatical errors and poor formatting, which make them easier to identify. However, this scam, which includes images of people’s homes, is a newer, darker twist.
You might be asking yourself, how exactly was the scammer able to identify your house address? According to Al Iverson, a cyber expert and industry research and community engagement lead at the software company Valimail, the sender likely found your address from a prior data breach that leaked personal data, and then used a Google Maps photo to put together an email.
