In the past several weeks, some of you may have gotten an email containing a PDF that contains a picture from your house.
Scary stuff. But it is 100% a scam. It's a play on a type of scam known as 'sextortion'. The goal of the scam is to threaten to release embarrassing photos or information of you unless you pay a ransom for the blackmail material. The scammers are counting on you to be scared enough to just pay the ransom and move on with your life. It's nearly as old as the scam of the prince who needs you to send him $50 so he can send you millions of dollars back. The new addition here is the addition of folk's homes using Google Maps.
While it's not known exactly how this happened it mostly likely played out like this:
Scammers created a template PDF that contained places for an image, your name, your address, and maybe your phone number
They then made a program that has access to a list of public data and Google Maps APIs
They then hit the GO button and proceeded to scare the snot out of everyone
This scam cast a very large net over the Internet and garnered a lot of attention for both mainstream media outlets as well as the cyber security community. It relied on compromised email accounts to send the targeted emails out. If you didn't have a good SPAM filter, you most likely received (maybe several copies) this email.
While this scam looks very legit at face value, here's a few tips that help identify it for the shame that it is:
The image is gathered using Google Maps Street View
It uses data that is easily scrapped from the Internet
Some of the data (in my case it was phone number and the image) is incorrect
It uses vague language and "feels" like a form letter
Asks for a ransom payment using bitcoin
If you have any questions, please contact us at https://www.onedaynerd.com/contact
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