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Tech Review discusses recent research on the Sextortion scams that have been going around in the last year or so -- you may have seen one of these emails that claims to have video of you watching pron, and attempts to blackmail you for some BTC, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614177/the-anatomy-of-a-sextortion-spam-campaign/ [technologyreview.com] The research abstract can be seen here, https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.01051 [arxiv.org]

We discover that one single entity is likely controlling the financial backbone of the majority of the sextortion campaigns and that the 11-month operation studied yielded a lower-bound revenue between $1,300,620 and $1,352,266. We conclude that sextortion spamming is a lucrative business and spammers will likely continue to send bulk emails that try to extort money through cryptocurrencies.

As usual, your friendly AC is always in the wrong business... but I was smart enough to cover my laptop camera with tape.

Original Submission