The young man in his twenties made his victims believe that he had hacked into their computer and that he was in possession of images showing them browsing pornographic sites. He then demanded a ransom for not disclosing the data.

He blackmailed intimate images in order to recover a ransom. A young Frenchman in his twenties living in Ukraine has just been unmasked and arrested by the police for "sextorsion".

The young hacker sent tens of thousands of emails in just a few months. Each time, the same threat: blackmail to those who frequent classified sites X. "Pornography was often mentioned, it was often believed to the victim that there had been intrusion, capture of data, that it was had filmed browsing these sites ", confirms François-Xavier Masson, the head of the central office of fight against cybercrime. "The scammer used the email address of the victim, sometimes mentioned an old password, which credited the idea that he had hacked the computer", he details at the microphone of Europe 1.

A simple scam

Once his victim was convinced that the hacker had compromising data, he "demanded a ransom, usually between 500 and 520 euros in Bitcoin to avoid disclosure of the items he had in his possession." If the staging was cleverly orchestrated, the young man had in fact not pirated the computer of his victim. "It was bluffing, a simple scam", summarizes the specialist in the fight against cybercrime.

A technique that "worked a little, since there were some payments, but few compared to the number of emails sent". The suspect would still have collected between 20,000 and 30,000 euros with his scam. Identified and arrested on his return to France, he was indicted for extortion and money laundering.