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Officials at the University of Central Florida are warning students of a “sextortion” email scam that has made its way around campus in recent days.
According to a report from The Orlando Sentinel, the “sextortion” emailer claims to be in possession of a video of users watching “adult video.” The email then demands $900 if they do not want the video shared with all of their contacts.
The email — which has been sent out over the course of the past week — involves someone nicknamed “darknet” who claims to have hacked into the user’s computer before copying all the contacts and using a webcam to record the videos the user has consumed.
Furthermore, the email warned the hacker “was most struck by the adult sites you occasionally visit” and says “you have a very wild imagination.” It then says $900 is “quite a fair price to destroy the dirt I created.”
The University of Central Florida tweeted about the scandal from their official account, asking students to report it should they be a target of this scam.
https://twitter.com/UCF/status/1055506423508074496
via UCF:
The Information Security Office would like to bring to your attention two email scams we’ve seen recently. Known as “sextortion” and gift card scams, both attempt to steal your money, either through extortion or deception.
This scam claims to have recorded webcam video of the recipient viewing adult content. The attacker threatens to send the video to the recipient’s social media and email contacts unless a payment is made. Recently, a new version of this scam has included a password that was previously used by the recipient in an attempt to increase the legitimacy of the threat. It is believed that these passwords were collected from older publicly-available data breaches. If any passwords included in the email are still in use by your accounts, you should change them immediately.
An example of the “sextortion” email can be seen below:
UCF
At this time, the university is currently investigating and do not have any suspects at this time.
