In January, Avast protected users from sextortion campaigns which could have resulted in over 500,000 incidents worldwide
Sextortion is an emerging online scam that takes advantage of people’s fear that their most intimate moments will be exposed to the public. They usually come in the form of emails, which are not only dangerous and unsettling but can have serious real-world consequences.
Tragically, sextortion email scams have even led victims to suicide, including a case involving five separate men in the UK and one in the United States. These are just a few of these types of cases.
In January, Avast protected users from various sextortion campaigns which could have resulted in more than 500,000 incidents worldwide. Most of these attacks targeted English-speaking users in the United Kingdom and the United States, though we detected campaigns in other languages as well. The image below shows the prevalence of sextortion attacks worldwide:
What is sextortion?
Sextortion starts with an email. Sextortion emails mislead victims into thinking the attacker owns a recording of their screen and camera and that recording contains images or videos of the potential victim in sexually explicit situations. The attackers use this claim of a recording to blackmail the victim into paying the attacker. The attacker threatens to send the recording to the victim’s contacts, friends, and family if they don’t comply. In reality, the attacker doesn't actually own any recordings and just uses sextortion email scams avast
