Sextortion scam goes still big

May 22, 2020

One day I received an email from the unknown sender. The text said: “Hi, I am a poor man’s virus but because of the poor technology and lack of money in my country I am not able to do anything with your computer. So, please be kind and delete an important file on your system and then forward me to other users. Thank you.”

Of course this is an old joke and I am pretty sure you have already seen it. Nowadays, the new version, adopted to the current situation, would be: “Hey, I am a poor man’s virus. Let me get straight to the point. Send me some pics or videos of you masturbating and, also, some bitcoins. Thank you.”

It may sound funny but sextortion is a real cyber crime problem. At Virusfree.cz, we are looking deeply into these matters seriously and sextortion scam is still a big issue. Long term analysis was already performed under the wings of Austrian Institute of Technology but we wanted to know what is going on right now. From April 29th, 2020 until May 20th, 2020 we’ve collected and analyzed 85843998 sextortion related scam emails.

Two interesting results came out of the analysis. First, only 20 BTC addresses were intercepted, second, at the moment of writing this blogpost, the rough income is only 4.656 BTC. There’s a simple explanation for that. Since this type of scam hits mostly individuals, the scammer requests lower sums. But don’t get fooled. These attacks are not seasonal, they can last very long in multiple campaign waves and the BTC addresses change almost each campaign. The risk of the investigation is almost none.

Crypto currencies are being used also with ransomware. Here, the requested fee is much higher and the attack can be focused also on the enterprises, NGOs, public sector, means almost every organization where the potential to pay the ransom and avoid the damage is higher. There’s possible risk of the investigation, especially when the affected organizations are from healthcare.

You can dig deeper, for the research purposes we are publishing five most frequently detected BTC addresses.

1PFBQYePV5uQeWZeVbfBHx3exZBrfyaXq5 14rQfWWng1zUUwrcSZ62XgTNU8CZseFTWh 19bWrB86z9ojTFnytNRT2k4jcGwTcmRysN 18QFxpKxqZTjiKVDQZmezyKgYEGTiiFrKQ 13WVfQkbqdsSUNBDPDWTLqSXeaYX1tZ6UD

If you are interested in getting more data contact us.