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Sextortion Scams
Comments
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The last one I got like this threatened specifically to share all the dirt they had on me with all my facebook contacts. That'll be none then, as I dont, and never have used it. Phew, my secrets are safe!
Mr Generous - Landlord for more than 10 years. Generous? - Possibly but sarcastic more likely.0 -
Like most scam emails - they just send the same email to hundreds of thousands of email addresses, with no knowledge of the recipient or the recipient's activities.
In this case, by pure coincidence, the email might match some of the recipients' activities.
In the same way, I could send an email to hundreds of thousands of email addresses saying something like "I'm watching you - I saw you drive your red car to Tesco yesterday". Maybe a few dozen people (or more) might be fooled into thinking I really was watching them, because they really did drive their red car to Tesco yesterday. But obviously, it's just a coincidence.
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That's not exactly what happened to the OP though as they weren't randomly selected.eddddy said:
Like most scam emails - they just send the same email to hundreds of thousands of email addresses, with no knowledge of the recipient or the recipient's activities.
In this case, by pure coincidence, the email might match some of the recipients' activities.
In the same way, I could send an email to hundreds of thousands of email addresses saying something like "I'm watching you - I saw you drive your red car to Tesco yesterday". Maybe a few dozen people (or more) might be fooled into thinking I really was watching them, because they really did drive their red car to Tesco yesterday. But obviously, it's just a coincidence.
The e-mail that they received contained details of one of their personal e-mail addresses along with the password for that e-mail account and it's personal details such as this that can help convince the recipients that the scammers do have all of the information that they claim to have.
The scammers (or perhaps another scammer who sold on the e-mail details) would have obtained the details from hacking a website that the OP's details were on and it's for reasons such as this that using the same password for multiple websites and accounts is never a good idea.0
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