Received an email threat at work

Having never been on one in my life it's easy to spot as a scam...

Same here. 1. I've never been on a porn site, let alone enjoyed myself to it in front of a computer (or anywhere else for that matter). Nobody else knows my password. 2. My computer camera has a sticker on it AND is broken which I realized when I tried to unsuccessfully reactivate it for some video chat. for good measure I put the sticker back on. 3. I couldn't make a Bitcoin transfer if my life depended on it. Let alone within 24 hours, which actually had already passed, because being on holiday I had not accessed my emails for two days.

In short, it was a blackmail effort that was so clearly doomed to fail that it was funny.

Way, way back in the very early days of the internet, I got my first bit of spam - it invited me to join some Eastern European young woman for exotic practices. It seemed to think I was a bloke, from what she was suggesting we might do.

I assumed (as I knew nothing about the existence of spam) one of my friends had spoofed me and accused a range of them until one of the savvier (American) ones let me in on the concept.

Is that scam bit of spam in English?

Inform your IT people and ignore.

I had something very similar threatening to release a video of me watching (and presumably "enjoying") a porn site if I didn't pay them off. Having never been on one in my life it's easy to spot as a scam but I imagine it could worry a few people

I'd agree with PP - report to IT and worry about it no more.

I got one from an alleged hacker threatening me with sending to all my email contacts a recording of myself watching porn on my computer (plus the actual porn would be visible in parallel in the vid). Unless I pay them with Bitcoin within 24 hours. It was ironic an so many levels. I just ignored it.

Haha
Am loving the spammer blocking the spammed.

Enhanced 😂😂🔥🔥🔥🔥

I got one threatening to inform my clients of my internet habits and thereby destroy my business. Sure my clients would find my viewing habits extremely dull (mumsnet holiday booking amazon prime for books etc)

Very common extortion spam and often sent to work emails, because the sender is aware that some people will be terrified of possible consequences.
Here is an article from Malwarebytes on extortion emails.

blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2019/02/sextortion-bitcoin-scam-makes-unwelcome-return/

Just a coincidence, OP. We got one like that to a generic group email at work too; also another that says we’d been caught watching porn - send money to hush it up; another that said they had control of our IT system - send money to avoid a shutdown.

I get one special one that says how to get a bigger boner

I used to get regular state agnostic penis enlargement ones. Decided one day to respond with a snarky email pertaining to my lack of necessary physique for a potential enlargement and copied in Kevin from IT, mentioning that, as a man, he might be more interested. Which led to Kevin copying in his colleague Jezza, me looping in my mate Marc, Marc getting hiw wife in on the conversation for her to share her take on just how much of an enlargement he should be going for ... etc.

Ended up keeping a bunch of us busy for a boring Friday at the office - and still ranks in our top 3 workplace hits on the grounds that it all ended with the spammer asking us to stop spamming him and blocking all of us.

I get one special one that says how to get a bigger boner 😂😂😂😂😎

re you not receiving a lot of spam.

our IT sends out statistics every now and then and the amount of mail that gets filtered out before it reaches you is huge.

It is spam, I had one the other day re supposedly outing my porn use lol i just deleted it.

Obviously spam ffs. We get this shit all the time at work.

Flag it to your IT department. I had a similar type email come through from a chancer. The IT department told me not to respond as this would validate that this was an active email address and the sender was blocked from our system.

It's spam - I've had a couple of them too (freaked out until I googled the wording and found others had them).

I get the porn ones too - which are obviously spam because I don't watch porn and wank in front of my laptop.

My OH got one of the porn ones and he emailed back saying that seeing as they knew which sites he was visiting could they recommend any better ones he may have missed. Strangely they didn't contact him again.

My ancient mother got one of these and immediately knew it was spam, because as she primly said to me, she hasn't even watched 50 Shades of Grey! [big grin]

Just spam.

Our IT dept. has asked us to just delete these as they were overwhelmed going through them and don't really need to see them.

Anytime someone wants bitcoin or gift cards/vouchers it's surely spam.

Practically speaking, if he were actually operating on the dark web and his business involved being contracted by people to do mean things to other people, and then habitually approached his victims and offered them the chance to not only avoid the mean thing but find out who asked for the mean thing to be done... well, it wouldn't be very good business, would it? No-one would ever employ you once word got around...

I'm not great with technology so sorry if this is a silly question - but why do you think this is related to the comment you made in the Times article? I get loads of these sent to my work email & wouldn't have even thought they were related to anything I'd written online - am I wrong? I thought they were just sent to random email addresses?

That was SO hard to read - my eyes are bleeding. I would want to annotate it with my red pen for bad English and bad grammar and return to sender!!

No-one who writes like that can possibly be a serious threat!

And of course it's spam.