Extortion

What is an Extortion Scam?

An extortion scam is a type of scam where someone threatens, coerces, or blackmails the victim into providing a form of payment or service through various methods of manipulation.

It is important to understand how these scams operate in order to minimize their effectiveness in practice.

Common practices

Although these claims are almost always false, they often rely on certain tactics to boost their credibility and confuse the victims that receive them. One of the most common tactic is for the phishing email to say, “I know your password”, or to include other information such as phone numbers or usernames. The information included in these emails might be real information that was apart of a previous breach in security. This is just another example showing the importance of periodically changing passwords, especially if you are informed about a breach containing any sensitive information.

How to tell

There are many ways to determine if an email is a phishing or extortion email. One of the simplest ways is to copy part of the email and paste it into google. If the email is suspicious, you will likely see multiple articles describing the scam.

Other things to look for include:

•  The email appears to come from someone at the university but contains parts of an email not included in the standard email for the university.
• The email requests a fee to apply for a job or asks you to send money through a variety of methods such as direct deposit or crypto currency.
• The email requests your password or directs you to a webform asking for your password.
• The email contains an immediate action such as “download this now” or “click on the link below.”
• The email tries to invoke an emotional response to get you to take action without thinking properly.
• The email is filled with spelling and grammatical errors.

What to do

If you have reason to believe that an email is suspicious or if you accidentally fall victim to a phishing or extortion email report it to security@ohio.edu.