Criminals and scammers have become all too common in crypto. Over the past few years, we have seen numerous methods of attack, with varying degrees of success. One new scam making the rounds is rather threatening in nature, even though not much effort has been put into it.
Threatening Cryptocurrency users Won’t Work
According to information shared on Reddit, scammers are getting more desperate when it comes to obtaining cryptocurrencies. More specifically, this latest scam indicates people are just sending out random emails with some harsh language in the hopes of getting recipients to send them a vast amount of Bitcoin in return. From a neutral point of view, it’s obvious that very little effort has been put into these emails.
The message itself leaves much to be desired. The sender identifies himself as a “member of a group of web criminals from Iraq”. While one has to give him kudos for the somewhat unique angle, it quickly becomes evident that messages like these are nothing more than spam. He states that the recipient’s email address was selected because it “will be checked”. That’s not exactly inspiring, to say the least.
Later in the email, the sender claims to have recorded the victim’s screen and to have evidence of the victim “self-abusing”. Supposedly, the hacker also managed to infiltrate the victim’s work network to turn it into a dedicated server for keylogging purposes, among other things. It doesn’t make any sense, but that is not even the best part.
The scammer goes on to ask the victim to pay a sum of $460 in Bitcoin. An address to which to send this money is also contained in the email, even though it is possible different addresses are used in different emails. No effort has been made to mask this address or even use a Tor-based page allowing would-be victims to make payments. It’s a rather unprofessional approach, to be honest.
What is even more surprising is that the email clearly tells users where they should buy Bitcoin. Unsurprisingly, the self-professed criminal has seemingly taken a liking to the Coinbase exchange. This should not tarnish the company’s reputation by any means, though. Should the recipient be unable to buy crypto from Coinbase, he or she is invited to look up a Bitcoin ATM using CoinATMRadar.
This is by far the lowest-effort scam attempt in the history of cryptocurrency. There is nothing even remotely worrying about emails like these, even though it is possible some novice users may be scared and pay the money regardless. If this is the new way to scam cryptocurrency users, the future looks a lot brighter. Low-effort attempts will become less of an annoyance at this rate.
