New Scam Alert: Nest Camera Records You Watching Porn, Emails Say

“Sextortion” scammers have a new trick, according to the cybersecurity firm Mimecast. The company reports that just after New Year’s Day, it saw a startling spike in emails threatening unsuspecting victims that their Google Nest cameras, and other home security cameras, have taken pictures of them in the nude, presumably in compromising situations, according to a CNBC report. Mimecast said that on January 2 and January 3, it intercepted more than 1,600 emails with the Nest can threats. The emails are a slight variation on the often-used scam in which the ‘sextortion’ emailer claims to have hacked into a user’s computer and activated the camera while the victim was surfing porn sites. But the email scam in considerably more “convoluted” than the typical sextortion email scheme, according to Mimecast data scientist Kiri Addison. The scam “starts out with a single email saying ‘we’ve got some nude photos of you,’” Addisson told CNBC. But from there, things get complicated. Unlike in most sextortion email scams, in which the scammers demand that the victim make a payment immediately, often in a cryptocurrency such as BitCoin, the new sextortionists send their victims a link to another site, which contains actual footage from Google Nest cameras. But the videos are, crucially, not taken by cameras owned by the victims. Instead they show public locations that look like places a victim may have frequented. The footage itself was downloaded from the official Nest site, according to Mimecast. “While it doesn’t belong to the victims and their Nest cameras have not been hacked into on this occasion, the footage from Nest’s official website was used to scare the victims,” the company said in a statement quoted by Bleeping Computer.  The scam emails then claim, “videos are currently being uploaded by your cell phone on several Porn websites servers and you have only a week till they are free for the public to view.” Victims are told to pay a ransom of about $550 to stop the supposed footage from being uploaded to a public site. In reality, that scammers have not hacked into victims’ Nest cameras or phones, according to Addison, who advises recipients of the emails to simply ignore them. “The campaign is exploiting the fact people know these devices can be hacked very easily and preying on fears of that,” Addison said. Photo By Nathaniel Railroad / Wikimedia Commons