Public Service Announcement: What you need to know about the eMail scam epidemic.

You know, I have decided to make this post, no it hasn't much to do with Entropia; but it has everything to do with doing my part to stop people from throwing away perfectly good money that if they are going to throw it away, at least throw it away on something that has a return. What am I talking about?

Check your spam folder in your favorite email accounts. Go through your junk mail, I would imagine perhaps sometimes it goes to your main inbox too; but some of you will notice threatening emails sent from what appears to be your own email address, to your email address. They are only spoofing it, and it isn't really sent from inside your own account.

It will make general statements about how they hacked your accounts or your files or accessed your cameras and caught some incriminating and embarrassing secrets which if you don't send them a sum of around $900 worth of Bitcoin, they say they will send the files to all of your contacts.

Well, I know my fellow Entropians would rather do 450 clicks of EP IV on full condition than worry whether or not some secrets might get out. But, there are plenty of people who actually are not aware of this scam, and sometimes they DO have enough specifics such as your old passwords to scare you with (which from all the data breaches that have happened with Google, Wells Fargo, etc, even Yahoo), it is asinine or ten to believe none of your information is out there. But that's rather my point. They MIGHT have your old passwords, but you changed them, right? RIGHT? Right. And that is clearly all they seem to have. If they actually had anything incriminating they would have given you a sample of it to prove they have it.

So; I went and searched on blockchain for the wallet address specified in one of these black-emails.. I figured I could at least see how many stupid people fell for it. Now, I can't imagine someone who is merely guilty of looking at porn, or webcamming or etc being uncomfortable with that being known. The reason I say this is, at least 95 out of 100 times that someone says they don't look at porn, they are lying. I mean, if you are being honest. Everyone wants to say they don't, but almost everyone does. It didn't get to be one of the biggest industries in the world for no reason. So, it stands to reason the people who actually paid up must either be really really guilty of something really bad and deserve to be ripped off, or they honestly were scared and worried about protecting a reputation that isn't in danger but they don't know any better.

Within the last week or so, there were SEVEN payments made to the bitcoin address given in the scam email. Damnedneer a whole bitcoin. That is an awfully high success rate for such a bad attempt at defrauding people.

The senders are probably in a third world country, and they likely do have enough technical knowledge to know how to instill fear in their "mark" with technobabble. All I know is, it is damned, damned hard to make an honest dollar, and it just burns me up seeing people actually making bank off of bullshit. I am a Capitalist through and through, caveat emptor, and laissez faire and all of that. Survival of the fittest and natural selection. But when you have come from the poorest of backgrounds like I have, clawed and scraped for every bit of prosperity that I have; it is downright repugnant and offensive that these people exist and are prospering.

If you MUST spend money, at least spend it to make more money, I wrote many books you can buy, a few of which tell you ways to make money! Every dollar you waste, especially on scams, is a dollar that can't be used to make you more dollars with. Because money is made usually by labor, or at least originally by labor, the money you will ever have, is finite. The effect of throwing $800 away now, results in thousands, tens of thousands, or even more lost in your future because you were not able to put that $800 to work for you. And I know that's a difficult concept for some people. I am still amazed there are people with $5K in the bank drawing less than 1% interest a year, but they keep it there cause "muh interest"... Yet they owe $5K on a credit card that they are paying 30% per year interest on... And its like... You are losing big time by saving there... But some people are beyond hope or help.

The moral of this post is; DO NOT fall for any blackmail emails that hit your inbox asking for bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency.