Users warned to be wary as scams flood email

PETALING JAYA: Some Malaysians have received threatening scam emails about alleged recorded videos of them watching pornography. The scammers would claim they had accessed the victim’s webcam and recorded them in compromising acts.But thanks to better awareness, some are wise enough to know that such email threats are usually fake.

A company executive known only as Lee, 38, said he received an email demanding that he pay a scammer a sum of money in bitcoins.“Otherwise, the scammer said he would upload a video of me watching porn through a streaming site.

“I laughed and didn’t think much of it as I did not recall doing anything embarrassing in front of my computer,” he said.

“The email also raised a lot of red flags. The only thing that was factually correct was my email address.”But in some cases, the scammer discovered the victim’s password.

Last year, Sunday Star reported on a scammer who demanded that a woman pay him US$888 (RM3,615) in bitcoins or he would spread a video of her viewing porn.

She knew the threat was baseless, but was worried about how he got hold of her password.

“In most cases, scammers obtain old passwords of a victim from data breaches that are publicly available online or sold on the Dark Web,” said CyberSecurity Malaysia chief executive officer Datuk Dr Amirudin Abdul Wahab.“They then put the information into an automated script that lets them send thousands of scam emails to those compromised accounts.”He urged those who had received such emails to immediately change their compromised passwords.