New wave of sextortion scams target work emails

Another wave of sextortion scams hit inboxes recently, only this time the scams were delivered using the Emotet botnet, which results in these harmful email scams going to potential victim’s work emails, which in turn made these scams more successful than previous campaigns.

Email sextortion scammers falsely claim via email that they have hacked the recipient’s device and have obtained compromising webcam footage of the recipient visiting adult websites, and go on to threaten to make that footage public unless the recipient pays an extortion fee.

Often these scammers attempt to use information they obtained from past data breaches – such as recipient names and passwords – to make their scams appear more convincing.

And recently, these scam emails have been using the Emotet botnet – a network of infected computers – to launch their scam email campaigns. Because Emotet is designed to infect corporations and business computers, this means the scam emails have been landing in work inboxes with more frequency than compared to other campaigns that would typically spam private or web based emails.

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According to security researchers, this has allowed this recent sextortion scam to be up to 10 times more successful than other campaigns.

It seems victims are more likely to pay the cryptocurrency ransoms when the scam is delivered to their work email.

Sextortion email scams are fast becoming one of the most popular email scams to hit inboxes worldwide, despite being a relatively new type of scam, first surfacing in 2018. The term “sextortion” can refer to any type of extortion where the crook threatens to release compromising footage or photos of a victim unless they pay money or send further compromising material.

However with these sextortion email scams, the compromising footage doesn’t really exist, but the crook is hoping their victims won’t realise that, and will pay up anyway.