14 DAY TRIAL // A 17-year-old from Detroit, Michigan, has been blackmailed by a group of hackers, presumably from the Philippines. The cybercriminals hacked into his webcam and demanded various amounts of money, threatening to publish an embarrassing video.
Security experts often warn that users should not give in to online extortion, whether it is by a piece of ransomware or cybercriminals who have hacked their webcam. While in many cases paying up might appear to be the only way, the cybercriminals usually keep asking for more and more money and there’s no guarantee that they’ll keep their part of the bargain.
The victim in this story, Hector Hernandez, learned this the hard way.
The cybercriminals hacked his computer by planting a remote access Trojan (RAT) on it. They took over the boy’s webcam and recorded an embarrassing video of him.
The hackers initially asked for $300 (€220), then for $1,100 (€800), and then for another $300 (€220), threatening to share the video with his friends and even publish it on his school’s website, Fox 2 News reports.
In order to pay the ransom money without telling anyone, Hernandez pawned his family jewelry. However the pawn shop only gave him $1,500 (€1,100) for jewels worth around $100,000 (€75,000).
He wired the money to the Philippines via Western Union. Such payments are almost impossible to trace, it’s unlikely that they’ll recover the money sent to the cybercriminals.
Now, Hernandez’s family is trying to recover the jewels from the pawn shop. Under normal circumstances, the 17-year-old shouldn’t have been able to sell the jewelry.
When confronted by Fox 2 reporters, the clerk at the pawn shop argued that people often come to him with fake IDs and it’s impossible for him to check their legitimacy. However, Hernandez claims he hadn’t used any fake ID and the store took the jewels knowing he was 17.