Off Topic Web scam

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sb_73

sb_73

Well-Known Member
Aug 18, 2012
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Warwickshire
This is probably blindingly obvious to the more tech savvy, but there is a nasty little scam going round which is worth knowing about.

You might receive an email seemingly from yourself (it isn’t) telling you that your device has been hacked and malware installed, giving them the ability to access your contacts, photos, camera, browsing history (!!!) etc and unless you send money to a bitcoin account they will take control of your device and send embarrassing photos/videos of you to all of your contacts. The scary bit is they include a password which you might be using/have used for something, adding authenticity.

Rest assured, they can’t do any of those things, what has happened is that your details have been released in a data dump from a website/app you have joined and have a password for that has been hacked is available for scammers to try to rip you off. They send literally millions of these emails out almost at random. I think the one I got was related to a Linked In hack of a couple of years ago. The message was lurking in the junk section of my inbox and it’s threatening pay up within 48 hours deadline was already well past, so the threats didn’t bother me (plus I use apple devices which are hard to hack, if not jail broken) but the password stuff did. So I spent a boring few hours changing all my passwords to properly secure ones using a password generator and changing the email address on accounts from the compromised one to another address. I am now closing the compromised email account. In the process I locked myself out of this site for 36 hours (thanks Nines and brb for sorting) but I’m sure no one missed me......

You can find out if your email address and a password is out there for scammers to use (‘pwned’ is I believe the technical term for it) on here
https://haveibeenpwned.com/
 
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sb_73 said:
This is probably blindingly obvious to the more tech savvy, but there is a nasty little scam going round which is worth knowing about.

You might receive an email seemingly from yourself (it isn’t) telling you that your device has been hacked and malware installed, giving them the ability to access your contacts, photos, camera, browsing history (!!!) etc and unless you send money to a bitcoin account they will take control of you device and send embarrassing photos/videos of you to all of your contacts. The scary bit is they include a password which you might be using/have used for something, adding authenticity.

Rest assured, they can’t do any of those things, what has happened is that your details have been released in a data dump from a website/app that has been hacked is available for scammers to try to rip you off. They send literally millions of these emails out almost at random. I think the one I got was related to a Linked In hack of a couple of years ago. The message was lurking in the junk section of my inbox and it’s threatening pay up within 48 hours deadline was already well past, so the threats didn’t bother me (plus I use apple devices which are hard to hack, if not jail broken) but the password stuff did. So I spent a boring few hours changing all my passwords to properly secure ones using a password generator and changing the email address on accounts from the compromised one to another address. I am now closing the compromised email account. In the process I locked myself out of this site for 36 hours (thanks Nines and brb for sorting) but I’m sure no one missed me......

You can find out if your email address and a password is out there for scammers to use (‘pwned’ is I believe the technical term for it) on here
https://haveibeenpwned.com/
Click to expand...

I had one of these a few weeks ago. When they quoted my password (albeit a very old one), it was certainly disconcerting, but when they said that they were going to publish video of me pleasuring myself whilst watching porn, I knew it had to be a scam. I've never done either of those things, of course.
 
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Stroller said:
I had one of these a few weeks ago. When they quoted my password (albeit a very old one), it was certainly disconcerting, but when they said that they were going to publish video of me pleasuring myself whilst watching porn, I knew it had to be a scam. I've never done either of those things, of course.
Click to expand...

Ahem... :)
 
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It is a somewhat scary thing, though. They definitely had a genuine old password (it was QPR-related, I've moved on since then) but I figured that there was nothing I could do about anything compromising they might have, so I just ignored it. I seem to remember reading about a young fella who topped himself after receiving similar threats, though. Bastards.
 
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I’ve been getting a lot of calls, almost daily, from a voice recorded message saying its from the ‘data fraud agency’ and thaty internet has been comprised etc etc. Tells you to push 1 to go through to an agent.
Always good for a laugh when you are bored to play the Indian call taker for as long as long as you can (my record is 13 mins)
Shame that some old people will get caught out.
 
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I had one of those too.

They threatened to tell my wife about the porn sites I had been on..

Luckily I really didn't need to worry too much about that threat. ( I'm really not a trucker called Vern....Kiwi)

Sent from my STF-L09 using Tapatalk
 
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