How Can I Tell If This “sextortion” Email Is Legitimate?
Spam is annoying, but you shouldn’t see much of it in your actual inbox if you’re using a decent provider for your email. At the very least, I find that rarely does something slip through Gmail’s powerful spam blockers and makes me think about opening it.
The downside is that when you receive an email that sounds rather unpleasant, you doubt yourself. If Gmail didn’t flag it as spam, even if it sounds like spam, is it really spam? And then the sender raises the bid even more, as Lifehacker reader Liang describes:
“Hi, sorry to interrupt, I recently got a sextoring message from myself, I tried to block it but I can’t, and when I replied, the message was sent to my account. May I ask if I was hacked or is it just spam. Also, how did the hacker send the email using my account? “
Here’s the good news, Liang. You are not being sexted. You are just being spammed, and unfortunately there are many people who fell for this nonsense and ended up sending these scammers money, bitcoins, logins or who knows what else.
How do I know this? Well, let’s be honest with each other. If you don’t have any malware on your system that launches your webcam, takes recordings, and then sends those recordings to a third party who also knows exactly who you are, I really don’t think anyone caught you when you are doing something that you might not want to share for public consumption. And you can verify this by asking yourself a quick question: How many times have I been naked in front of the computer in the past few months?
As a consequence, you may be asking yourself: if someone has incriminating photos or videos of me, why are they threatening me without presenting any evidence? The vague “mistake” seems to be something that most people will ignore; The real image of your naked ass emailed by a stranger as evidence of a hack will be much harder to forget – and will likely lead to more lucrative results for the attacker.
But the reason you don’t get evidence for this sextort is that it doesn’t exist. You have not been hacked. You can run a quick system scan for viruses and malware if you like and change the passwords for whatever cloud storage services you use to save your photos, but I wouldn’t spend too much time doing that. You are lured with boring spam, but the casual internet user doesn’t really have your naughty photos.
As for the letter that came from yourself, it is quite simple to do. A quick Google search reveals many websites that can be used to trick senders . So, again, I would not use the fact that you received an email from “yourself” as proof that someone hacked into your computer or email account and got hold of your secret stash of sexy selfies. This is a clever trick that is likely to trick some people, but not like that, at least not anymore.
In fact, I would bet that the email you received is probably one of the “regular” boilerplate or spray-and-pray attacks that spammers send out in droves . Even if 99.5% of recipients ignore the message, the cost of sending this spam to a group of millions of leaked email addresses is low, and a simple return is worth the small amount of time it takes to send a ton of emails. You can see some examples of typical email sextortion here ; yours is probably very similar to one of them.
While some Lifehacker readers are probably sighing and wondering why we’re even trying to talk about this – since it’s such obvious spam – I think it’s more helpful to remember that not everyone has the same level of technological knowledge. This is why your grandparents are probably asking you all the time about the various spam emails they receive. Or, even worse, why they were themselves subjected to multiple attacks.
This kind of spam engenders the primal fear of the digital age, and I’m sure it gets a lot more attention than your typical “BUY PilLS for CHEAP! one !!” shit. This is especially true if you know you’ve done anything on your devices, including your nude body, your semi-nude body, your friends’ nude bodies, or any other interesting combination. But terrible spam remains spam; until someone posts a photo of you in an embarrassing position, which you must then discuss with the local police, delete the email, and get on with your day. Are you okay.