New extortion email threatens your website’s reputation

A new extortion email scam is doing the cyber rounds that warns the recipient that their website’s reputation will be ruined unless they cough up a ransom.

Extortion emails scams are becoming worryingly popular. Throughout the year we’ve been warning about an extortion email scam that (falsely) claims to have come from a cyber-crook who has hacked your webcam in order to obtain compromising footage of you watching adult websites. Footage that will be set loose to your friends and family unless you pay up.

It was all a load of drivel, of course. Cyber-crooks just send these emails out en masse in the hope of it reaching the inbox of someone who both does happen to frequent such sites and is tech-illiterate enough to believe the scam’s claims.

The latest email scam spreading between inboxes is also attempting to extort victims through a pure bluff, but it has dropped the “adult content” spiel and is stating that unless the recipient pays up, the crooks will ruin their website’s reputation. As is the norm with these types of scams, payment is requested via crypto-currency – namely Bitcoin.

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Again, judging by the number of reports, it seems the crooks are just sending these extortion emails out in their thousands in the hope of reaching someone who both owns a web domain (or manages one) and isn’t savvy enough to spot the bluff.

So what specifically are the emails claiming? According to the crooks behind the email, unless the recipient pays up, their website will be flooded with negative reviews, they will spoof the website in order to spam thousands of other websites through email or comment spam and ultimately get your web domain blocked by your hosting provider, thus ruining your reputation.

Below is an example of such an extortion email.

Hey. Soon your hosting account and your domain –redacted– will be blocked forever, and you will receive tens of thousands of negative feedback from angry people.

Here is a list of what you get if you don’t follow my requirements:
+ abuse spamhouse for aggressive web spam tens of thousands of negative
+ reviews about you and your website from angry people for aggressive
+ web and email spam lifetime blocking of your hosting account for
+ aggressive web and email spam lifetime blocking of your domain for
+ aggressive web and email spam Thousands of angry complaints from angry
+ people will come to your mail and messengers for sending you a lot of
+ spam complete destruction of your reputation and loss of clients
+ forever for a full recovery from the damage you need tens of thousands
+ of dollars

Do you want this?

If you do not want the above problems, then before June 1, 2019, you need to send me 0.3 BTC to my Bitcoin wallet: –redacted–

How do I do all this to get this result:
1. I will send 30 messages to 13 000 000 sites with contact forms with offensive messages with the address of your site, that is, in this situation, you and the spammer and insult people. And everyone will not care that it is not you.
2. I’ll send 300 messages to 9,000,000 email addresses and very intrusive advertisements for making money and offer a free iPhone with your website address xxx.nl and your contact details. And then send out abusive messages with the address of your site.
3. I will do aggressive spam on blogs, forums and other sites (in my database there are 35 978 370 sites and 315900 sites from which you will definitely get a huge amount of abuse) of your site xxx.nl. After such spam, the spamhouse will turn its attention on you and after several abuses your host will be forced to block your account for life. Your domain registrar will also block your domain permanently.

So, could they do what they are claiming?

Theoretically, there is nothing above that couldn’t be done by a cyber-crook with enough technical know-how and time on their hands. But that doesn’t mean if you get such an email you need to worry. As we state above, these emails are being sent out thousands of times, meaning it’s pretty clear that the crooks aren’t going to spend all of their time carrying out their threats on anyone who doesn’t pay.

The sort of website-reputation-damaging threats they babble on about in their emails – while possible – are no easy feat, and would take a fair amount of time. And crooks would rather spend their time extorting money from people who don’t know any better than actually having to tediously carry out their threats on everyone who ignores their extortion emails.

As such, if you do get such an email, send it straight to the junk mail folder. It isn’t worth your time.