Sextortion scammers are now also attempting to capitalize on the COVID-19 pandemic by threatening their victims to infect their family with the SARS-CoV-2 virus besides revealing all their "dirty secrets".
If you have received such an email, it is important to know that this is just a scam and that no hacker has stolen your passwords or can infect you or your family with an actual real-life virus.
Just paying attention to their threats should be reason enough to discard their attempts at extortion and delete such emails immediately.
Sextortion emails were first seen in July 2018 when crooks started emailing potential victims and claiming that they have them recorded on video while they were browsing adult sites.
To increase their scam's credibility, the scammers also include the victims' passwords in some cases, leaked together with their email addresses as part of a previous data breach.
Coronavirus infection threats over email
The sextortion emails' subjects are in the "[YOUR NAME] : [YOUR PASSWORD]" form, presenting one of your passwords from the get-go as a proven tactic to catch the targets' attention and make them open the messages.
Next, the scammers attempt to send their victims into full panic mode by warning them that they know where they live, as well as "every dirty little secret" in their lives that will be exposed if $4,000 worth of bitcoins will not be paid within 24 hours.
These threats are also supplemented with the promise of infecting the target's entire family with the coronavirus as researchers at Sophos found.
Unfortunately for them, this is the part ..
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