I thought I was pretty savvy about email spoofs. It seems a week cannot pass without my Paypal account being limited. And I seem to have accounts in every American bank which have been compromised.
Yeah, right!
I few days ago I got an email headed "Your email account has been hacked. Change your password now".
It was in my spam folder but I made the error of going onto the server to read it (most of my email addresses are provided by my website company 1&1)
Well it was quite scary. The assertion was that this hacker had set up a trap on an "adult" website and was going to send the film plus what I was doing on my webcam to "all my workplace associates and friends" unless I paid $1000 into his bitcoin account.
At this point I had a good laugh as I don’t visit adult websites and don’t have a webcam on either of my PCs. However I subsequently went on to attempt some financial transactions via Paypal and they kept failing. I sincerely believed there was some connection and went into a full blown panic attack.
My nephew (who builds computers and websites) arrived and googled some of the phrases in the email. It turns out that this is a new version of a very old scam that it presently doing the rounds. Many of the words and phrases in MY email were identical to those given in examples.
https://www.virusresearch.org/remove-change-your-password-immediately-your-account-has-been-hacked-email/ Nephew immediately ran a virus remover program several times but if did not find anything sinister. The entire thing was spoof.
Well that was almost a week ago and I haven’t sent him/her any money.
Paypal was just having one of its “wobbly” phases.
But the email is really very scary.