“Watching dirty stuff is a waste of time, energy and minerals from the body. I hope you will think about this"

Jan 30, 2020 07:09 GMT  ·  By

Scamming tactics are getting a lot more complex these days, as the malicious actors behind them turn to personalized emails and methods to make blackmail notes look as legitimate as possible.

One such attempt was recently published on reddit, with the scammers telling the victims to stop masturbating because it’s “a waste of time, energy, and minerals from the body.”

The message sent on mail starts with a friendly approach, as the claimed hackers describes in detail how they broke into their victims’ devices.

“You watch pornographic [sic] videos very often and I caught you satisfying yourself. Well, we all do it from time to time,” the scammer explains before detailing the hacking technique they used. “Your router was not secured I was able to inject some code into the firmware and every device connected on the network including phones were compromised,” the message continues.

Growing number of sextortion emails

The scammers then go on to explain that while the router manufacturer has already patched the vulnerability, some data like contact lists, phone numbers, emails, and social media contacts are in their possession. Including “the video with you doing… you know what,” that is, as silent recording was possible following the alleged hack.

So what the scammers want is for their victims to send some $500 in Bitcoin, otherwise the video would be sent to all contacts extracted from the network.

The message ends with another anti-masturbation advice.

“Search for what is No Fap and read about the benefits of no PMO. Watching dirty stuffs [sic] is a waste of time, energy and minerals from the body. I hope you think about this very seriously,” it reads.

While this is obviously a scam and no hack actually occurred, sextortion emails are becoming a growing threat with more victims across the world. Data provided by UK’s National Crime Agency revealed that the number of victims jumped from 428 in 2018 to over 1,300 in 2017.