A number of agents and industry suppliers yesterday received an email supposedly from reviews site allAgents and apparently blackmailing them over porn.
allAgents said it is investigating how this can have happened.
Any agent who has received the email that involves a blackmail demand for payment should disregard it.
The email is a scam. Do not click the link, do not send the email on to anyone, and do not make any payment.
Simply double delete it as soon as possible.
The scam is a well known one and there have been warnings in the press and from the police.
The recipients are told that there is a video clip of them and their behaviour while watching a porn site, which they are warned will be sent out to their contacts unless they pay a sum of money, usually in bitcoin.
The email is clearly a scam which most people thankfully recognise. However, it has caused enormous worry to some more vulnerable people – it has been associated with at least one suicide, and some people have been duped into making payments.
The twist is that this particular email seems to have very clearly come from allAgents.
Nothing about the threat is real: no one has any ‘film’ of anyone being on a porn site. No film will be sent to contacts. The fact that the email has been sent to individual email addresses only means that those addresses have been taken from an internet database.
The ‘allAgents’ email was doing the rounds yesterday, starting with the unpleasant message: “I really advise you to study this letter.”
A spokesperson for allAgents told EYE: “We are aware of an isolated incident involving spam emails being sent to a small number of contact lists on our standalone email-marketing suite.
“Other than the unsubscribe link, we are not aware of any emails that had malicious links in them. The outcome was that no one was ever at risk to any virus or malware.
Comments (15)
When’s the Double D show for the Purple member fraternity turning up!
Do you trust AllAgent’s not to let this happen again? Should you block their emails completely? It could’ve been so much worse.
Did this scam email go to everyone in the Allagents database or just to a few? What is the extent of the distribution?
In a separate email sent by allagents asking for payment to advertise on their site, Agents have been advised that this is also a complete scam which lacks any commercial value.
I hope Allagents will be reporting this to the ICO within the required timeframe……
To be fair to them, it may not be their internet database which these were sent to, and it’s easy enough to send an email and make it look like it came from a legitimate source and as such they may not have actually breached anything here.
They were compromised. If you check the message headers of the email, the designation IP address is their email server IP address.
Spoofing is common, but not in this instance.
Fair enough 🙂
Christ, PB PR has really kicked up a notch
And made me laugh out loud!
It’s hard not to laugh a little (behave!)
”The recipients are told that there is a video clip of them and their behaviour while watching a porn site”
…I can’t think of anything less interesting than watching someone, watching porn…although given that many of the supposed recipients will be in Agency, it may not be the first time they’ve been sent an email regarding a well-appointed semi with an intermittently functioning water feature…it just isn’t usually their own…
Thank you, I’ll be here all week 😉
comment of the day without doubt!
Made me smile on a wet Wednesday morning.
What about ‘Coming with 2 Acres’??