ou've probably read it on Twitter or heard it from your friends* that scammers are emailing people saying that they've been recorded watching porn and masturbating to it.
To prevent these videos from going public, the scammers demand you to pay them in the form of bitcoin.
Hold on, let me try rolling my eyes as far back as possible.
First thing you need to know about this scam: You're not the first one and will not be the last.
Reports of this scam have been going on since 2019. But why are they asking you to pay them in Bitcoin?
Bitcoin runs on a network called blockchain. It's made up of a bunch of blocks connected to each other via cryptography and no one controls this network.
If data is sent through this network, it's safe to say that the information is secured and it would be extremely difficult to trace.
But, we're only human, and humans make mistakes. The same rule applies to these scammers.
Back in November 2019, my girlfriend got the same email - worded differently but the concept is the same - and she was given two days to transfer the Bitcoins or they would leak her nudes on the internet. Well, it's been months and nothing has happened.
My girlfriend is quite a paranoid person, she's always careful with the sites she visits and always has her webcam taped. So we knew it was impossible for the scammer to record her.
I, on the other hand, was rather furious that someone would do this to her. So I wanted to find the origins of this son of a bitch (let's call him S.O.B.).
And I did.
In the case of my girlfriend, the SOB was using this email "recordedyou05@9575.com". This is what you need to know about emails: The string of words after the alias (@) represents the website that the email originates from.
Usually, when you get yourself a web address and webserver, you can also get an email address associated with the address name.
So I typed in www.9575.com - please do not visit this site for worries of malware - to check what's this website all about. I found a text saying I need to open it on my mobile.
Which was dodgy as fuck.
In some cases, you can use a web address look up to know where it was bought and whom it's registered to.
As of writing this story, the domain seems to be registered to no one. But in November 2019 I found that this person was residing in Shenzhen, China.
To do this, you can visit ip2whois.com. It'll show you the domain bank that the person is renting from or if they're hosting it from their home.
ip2whois would also show you the IP address of who is hosting the domain. From there, you could send the hosting company a report that the person is trying to scam you and get them to inform the authorities.
But the most important way to avoid yourself from being a victim of this scam is not to visit dodgy websites, ensure that your computer's firewall is active, and just be vigilant of who you're giving your information to.
Also do not, for the love of everything that is good in this world, pay these bastards your money.
