As we
know, there are ~235 billion emails sent per day, a number that keeps growing
year-on-year. A staggering 48%
of that traffic is spam of one description or another, a figure that has
actually come down 21% in the past 4 years alone. Despite varying scams and
spam being prevalent and well-known, still people fall for them and shell out hundreds
of thousands of pounds to cyber criminals each year. Today, I’m going to take a
look at an interesting blackmail spam email I received and break down how to
identify this as something obviously a scam, and why it is also a phishing expedition
as opposed to real blackmail. I’ve taken out my email details, but the rest is
exactly how I got it:
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| A Fun Blackmail Scam attempt |
The
first to check, with every email you get not just the ones you suspect of being
dodgy, is the sender name and email address. Now even a neo-luddite can spot
that something is fishy here: 986@501.416 is
clearly not a real email address. If you aren’t sure, copy and paste the
address into your search engine of choice and see what comes up. This might not
always work, as there is such a thing as address spoofing, but that tends to be
on the rare side, usually kept for specific criminal campaigns. It is always
good to make sure that email is legitimate, so if you are still unsure, ask
someone who will know.
Normally
at this point, I’ve binned the offending message and moved on, but for now, I’ll
continue with the deconstruction. Have
you noticed the subject line? Even a wary person might glance twice at this
email in a panic at seeing that. Now, the subject here is actually a big giveaway
that this is pure rubbish: what law enforcement agency in the world would go
and warn a suspect that they know the suspect has been watching child porn? Let’s
be real here, if they suspected anything of the sort, they’d be through the
door with a warrant and clamping you with hand-irons ready to throw you in
clink and forget you exist. So clearly, this is a scam, and will almost
certainly involve blackmail.
Moving
on to the contents, and it’s the usual type of thing: Hey you, we caught you do
X and have proof, so pay up. The first paragraph is almost enough to convince
you that your computer at least, was used like it claims. The second paragraph
that reveals the email’s intended audience: only in the USA would they be
worried about the FBI, as they have no power or authority anywhere else. Then
the illusion is truly broken with the mention of a “special tracking pixel”. I’ve
been involved with computer technology my entire life and can quite clearly
state that this is technobabble: it is nonsense created to scare and
intimidate. This is the setup for the next part of the email: hand over your
cash.
This
last section of the email is actually rather interesting: it specifies some
rather vague instructions on paying 0.1BTC (Bitcoins). Now, anyone who has gone
to this much effort to go mass-mailing blackmailing usually wants to ensure
that for the minority who will fall for this sort of scam will pay up and would
provide clearer instructions on how to do so. Even ransomware designers give
better instructions that “Google it”. It
seems very rushed and a more than a little slap-dash, as if this is a first
effort, or this is as much English as they know. But as I have pointed out,
this is a wide net cast to pickup what it can indiscriminately, so full detail
and accuracy doesn’t really matter. What the scammers are really counting on is
fear and panic, not accurate technological descriptions.
To
recap:
1. Check the name and email
address
2. Is the subject line too worrying?
3. Lots of technobabble that is
meaningless?
4. Location-specific information
that is irrelevant to you?
5. Asks for money?
If
any of these list-items sound familiar, delete the email safe in the knowledge you’ve
avoided a scam.
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