A new Symantec reports highlights the rise of sextortion emails, which claim that the sender has obtained embarrassing information about the recipient, such as a video recorded by their webcam while they were browsing adult websites. The victim is told to pay the sender a certain sum in a given cryptocurrency in order to prevent them from making the embarrassing information public.
In the first five months of this year, Symantec blocked around 289 million scam emails, including many sextortion messages, 30% of which were sent around Valentine’s Day. Sextortion and other extortion-based email scams are increasingly popular among cybercriminals because they are easy to pull off and the payoff can be substantial.
Read more: Sextortion Email Scams Rise Sharply
