Hey All! I hope you're hanging in there. We've been out just bit (with masks, of course) to get our flowers and some grocery shopping. Other than that, I haven't bought anything this past week.
But, I want to spend a minute talking about all the scams out there right now. I'm getting things like: "your PayPal account has been frozen", or "someone has charged x# of dollars in the App Store" or your "Amazon account needs updating."
Whenever any of these things happen, I DO NOT click on anything in the email---even though it instructs you to do so. Instead, I go directly to PayPal, or Amazon or the App Store and look for myself to see if anything unusual is going on. So far, nothing has, so I just ignore all that crap.
The purpose of this post is about something far more sinister. This past week, I got a threatening email that is pretty darn scary. Basically, it's some sort of blackmail scam. They say that they have all of my contacts and will send emails to them that will "ruin my life and embarrass my family". They want 3000 bitcoins as a "donation" rather than call it blackmail. They are giving me 3 days. Then it was 24 hours. And another today even more threatening and giving me a final 24 hours.
I do not know what bitcoins are or how much money this actually is. They seem to have one of my passwords which they included in the email. That's really scary. I haven't done anything except trash the emails. I don't know if anything will happen, I doubt it. Butch has gotten one of these before. They are really scary.
The scariest part is I have no idea if they really have my contacts. I hope not.
I went online and found a site that talks about this scam. Apparently they are running rampant right now. You can find out more about them here. If you get one of these emails, this site lists places you can report them. I'm going to.
That's my public service announcement for the week!
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That's such a coincidence, my husband had one of those emails last week! He had 24 hours to pay up, well he didn't! We weren't sure where to report it to so will have a look at your link. But it is scary that they did have a password that he had used in the past which makes you wonder how they got that. If only people could use their technology knowhow for good instead of trying to scam people!
ReplyDeleteThey get the passwords on the dark web from hackers. The only thing you SHOULD do is change the password if you are still using it.
ReplyDelete