PINECREST, Fla. – A woman who lives in Pinecrest received a threatening email from a scammer who had a lot of her personal information and even names of family members.
That woman, who wished to remain anonymous, said the email she opened on Friday left her shaking.
“Total fear. I felt like someone was inside my house. Like someone was looking at me,” she said. “I said oh my god, these people are threatening me.”
It came from a Gmail account, from a name she didn’t know.
“It had my address, my phone number,” she said. “I felt like it was maybe someone I know sending me this document, maybe travel information.”
The attachment was a letter with startling language.
“You don’t know what I’m capable of…you do not know anything about me, but I know everything about you,” the letter read.
There was even a photo taken near her home.
“It had the name of my children and all kinds of stuff that was going to happen to me,” the victim said.
The threat was exposing what the scammer called “footage of filthy things” to all of her contacts, or pay the scammer $1,950 in Bitcoin.
“You feel like you’re being watched,” she said. “Like at any point you could be hurt.”
In fear, she called a trusted Pinecrest police detective, who urged her to report to the FBI.
“What she did was perfect, she just reported it,” Zacharia Baldwin, an FBI supervisory special agent, said.
Baldwin said this exploitative, overseas scam is nothing new, but has become more sophisticated, using publicly available data and photos to customize their approach and terrify their targets.
“Once you see one piece of personalization, then you start to panic and you don’t see clearly,” said Baldwin. “And then fear comes into play. If you notice in the letter, there’s always a time sensitive factor into it, which plays on it and you’ll see that across a lot of these scheme.”
If you get a scam email like this, do not reply.
Instead, report it to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
“We always encourage people to report,” said Baldwin. “Little drops turn into big puddles. The smallest tip can blow up into big information.”
Information like the Bitcoin account in the letter can be of use to investigators.
“We can use that to trace it out, or we can see other similar payments and we know that there’s multiple victims involved,” Baldwin said.
Local 10 News reached out to Gmail, which provided the following statement:
“Defending against this type of scam is an ongoing priority for us. We protect Gmail users from nearly 15 billion unwanted messages a day, blocking more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware. Our tools and security experts are constantly scouring to spot new attack methods and building new, sophisticated protections to help keep people safe. This blog shares some common email scam formats. While we published it during the 2022 holiday season, it’s still relevant today. Meanwhile, we just posted this blog in October that outlines how to spot scams, and what to do if you encounter one.”