There’s a scam involving an increasing number of people. It’s called crypto porn.
The scam is not yet well known to most people, but it’s spreading fast, especially in France. This was reported by the French version of Yahoo Finance.
In reality, the methods are similar to those of other scams: scammers try to convince their victims that someone accessed their webcam by sending them a message threatening to publish some compromising images recorded via webcam.
Obviously, the hacker promises not to publish these images on the Internet if a certain amount, usually a few hundred euros, is paid in cryptocurrency.
Unfortunately, this scam is often very effective because, although the fraudsters are probably lying by saying that they got hold of compromising images, they show their victims some of their personal information that they got hold of in other ways, such as old passwords, which were probably bought from hackers on the dark web.
This is often enough to convince the victims to believe this story and to trick them to pay. Technically, this is called sextortion, sexual extortion.
Moreover, out of shame or simple fear, the victims of this type of scam often do not reveal that they have been scammed and do not report the incident to the police.
Despite this, the French national system of assistance to victims of cyberbullying or digital attacks, Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr, has been able to detect a dramatic increase in crypto-porn cases in the last twelve months, as requests for help in this regard have exploded: during 2019 they received 90,000, compared to 28,855 the previous year, an increase of more than 3 times.
Actually, last year, 38% of all requests for assistance received by the French website concerned this type of blackmail, i.e. much more than account hacking (14%) or phishing (13%), so in 2019 crypto-porn would seem to have been the most widespread online scam in France.
