Sextortion, a popular form of online blackmail, is on the rise. Security researchers, ESET reports a 178% increase in sextortion emails between the first half of 2022 and the first six months of 2023, marking the category out as a top email threat. ESET ranks sextortion emails third among all email threats in H1 2023. Most sextortion emails arrive unsolicited and claim to have compromising images or videos of the victim taken via their webcam, which will be shared with friends and contacts if a ransom is not paid.
“Today, we are seeing a clear rise in emails that claim to have obtained personal, sexual material without the victim knowing. As you can imagine, receiving an email of this nature creates fear and anxiety that some of the victim’s more intimate or personal moments have been captured and risk being shared with friends and family as well as the public,” says ESET global cyber security advisor Jake Moore.
While many of these scams have been discovered to be fake, sextortion can also refer to threat actors using deepfake technology to create explicit sexual content featuring the victim’s face, which they then use to demand a ransom. Sometimes, real photographs are also used. In the past, individuals such as senior executives and politicians have also been targeted by ‘sexting’ scams where a prominent individual is blackmailed after exchanging messages of a sexual nature with a third party.
Cybersecurity firm Social Catfish, reports that teenagers are increasingly vulnerable to sextortion scams. Social Catfish examined reports on victims under the age of 20 from the years 2017 to 2020. In a variety of scams, victims under 20 lost $8.2 million in 2017, rising to $210 million in 2022. The FBI termed it a “horrific increase.” During 2022, sextortion schemes targeted at least 3,000 victims and tragically resulted in more than a dozen suicides, according to FBI sources.
These would not be the first suspected fatalities resulting from sextortion rackets. The most infamous example is probably that of Ashley Madison, a US-based sex-cheating website aimed at people already married or in relationships, that was hacked in 2015, exposing the identities of around 30 million users. The following months saw numerous reports of suspected suicides linked to the hack, such as that of a New Orleans pastor who was reported to have referred specifically to Ashley Madison in a suicide note.
With sextortion scams on the rise, the problem is likely to worsen in the coming months. Earlier this month, for example, the University of Central Florida Police Department reported an increase in scams targeting students. UCF Police said it has received “several reports” from students who claimed to have been scammed into sending nude or other explicit photographs to third parties online. The students were then threatened and coerced into buying gift cards or paying money to prevent the photos from being sent to family and friends over the internet.
