Blackmail scams: what they look like and how to avoid them

Blackmail scams claim your email has been hacked and threaten to release embarrassing videos of you to your friends and colleagues. Here's how to spot these fake messages and stay safe.

Scammers will employ all sorts of tactics in a bid to get you to hand over your cash.

The most common forms of email scams tend to revolve around the sender posing as someone else in order to trick you into revealing your bank details or other personal information that they can send on, perhaps by pretending to be your bank, a large retailer or even a loved one.

However, with blackmail scams things may work a little differently, with the sender less focused on presenting themselves as someone legitimate and more focused on trying to push you into paying them money, with the threat of some horrible repercussions if you don’t.

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What do blackmail email scams look like?

Blackmail scams can take a number of different forms.

In recent years there has been a spate of blackmail scams in which the recipient is threatened with having the record of what pornographic material they have watched shared with everyone in their contacts list.

Last year Action Fraud highlighted the growth in this form of scam, noting that the senders would include references to the victim’s passwords in a bid to increase the chances of success.

The loveMONEY team has been on the receiving end of this sort of blackmail scam too, as detailed in the screenshots below.

The scammer claims to have installed some sort of malware on the recipient’s computer, which allowed them to film the user on their webcam, as well as the video they were supposedly watching at the time.

What’s really interesting in the example we received is that the scammers managed to spoof the sender address – the email seems to have been both sent and received by the loveMONEY editorial team email address.

As you can see, the standard of English is pretty dreadful here, common with many other forms of email scam. Normally, poor grammar would be a dead giveaway if the scam message was purportedly to be from a well-known company or brand.

But in this instance, as it's supposedly been sent by a foreign hacker, that's not the case.

What do blackmail email scams want you to do?

Generally, the senders of these dodgy emails want you to make some sort of payment in order to get them off your back.

Unsurprisingly, they don’t want you to make a payment directly into a bank account, since that could be traced. Instead, the scammers will often try to get you to make a payment in some form of cryptocurrency, often Bitcoin.

If you don’t make the payment by the stated deadline, the scammers claim they will release the video of you in an apparently compromising position to everyone you know.

In truth, this is absolute rubbish – there is no such video for the scammers to release to the wider public.

If you cough up the cash, you won’t be saving yourself from embarrassment, you’ll be out of pocket and exposing yourself to further scam attempts.

How to protect yourself from blackmail scams

Action Fraud has outlined a number of steps you should follow if you find yourself on the receiving end of one of these scam emails.

First of all, don’t reply to the email or feel pressured into paying up.

The scammers are lying and trying to see how gullible you are. If you do respond in any way, it suggests that you’re vulnerable to these sorts of scams, which only guarantees that you’ll receive more of them.

If the scammer mentioned an actual password that you use, it’s well worth going through whatever accounts you may have that use that password and switching it to something else.

Action Fraud suggests that wherever possible it’s a good idea to enable two-factor authentication – that extra layer of security can make a lot of difference.

It’s a good idea to ensure that you have up to date anti-virus on any of your connected devices, while ensuring that you download software and app updates will help them avoid falling foul to new forms of malware.

Finally, if you have been tricked into paying up after receiving one of these emails, you should report it to the police. If you didn’t pay then report the email to Action Fraud.