I got two of these types of emails last night. While I have occasionally viewed a raunchy video, it was pretty clearly hinky, for numerous reasons (misspellings, fact that the password is not associated with either my email of Facebook, and I don’t even have a Messenger account, I rarely allow a webcam to see me, etc.). If it was a serious threat, they’d send a sample video.
This is a federal felony, but I find it kind of amazing that if you want to report it to the FBI, you do it by phone, instead of forwarding to an email address. The country’s in the very best of hands.
A federal felony unless you are Donald Trump; in that case, the victim is guilty of something.
The FBI is a pretty useless Federal Agency. This is some while ago when my parents house was broken into and some of my identity documents my parents were keeping were taken.
I phoned the FBI, and the response was “why are you bothering us?” I tried the Social Security Administration, and they seemed happy to take my call and offered advice on monitoring my credit. The Social Security Administration seems to have much better relations with the public than the FBI.
The IRS comes across stolen identities all the time and yet does very little about it unless they mess up and try and collect taxes from the real person for the fake person. Then they are forced into action when the real person complains about their identity being stolen. Considering how many millions of people use stolen identities, the IRS has to be in on it.
Next time you get your SSA statement of benefits, look closely to see if there is an A after the SSN. If there is, it is because taxes have been paid under that SSN that the IRS can’t directly attribute to you, the assumed account holder. This would be like if you live in Ithaca, NY and the IRS gets payroll taxes for your SSN from Reno, NV. They’ll assign it to a different letter, and the bonus is they get to keep it; it doesn’t add to your accrued benefits.
Reason number 1,724 why neither identity theft nor immigration are taken seriously in this country.
Thanks! — will look for that.
If I could still believe real FBI agents were as competent and dedicated as Lewis Erskine, David Rossi, or even Peter Burke, I’d have more confidence in them.
Now, instead, I expect them to be more like Peter Strzok. {{{shudder}}}
Great post. I seem to recall though that Burke took liberties when it suited him, I doubt that happened with Erskine or even Rossi, the writers in those days lived in a totally different world. Amazing to think that the writers of White Collar likely created a more accurate character; the FBI has been doing whatever it pleased since day one, the script writers for the other series seemed to present the image the FBI wanted them to portray
Yep. Erskine was the FBI’s Joe Friday in a lot of ways.
Yeah, I’ve gotten a few of these, and blew them off.
BTW, that viral video of a guy watching Scandal in the Locker Room is NOT me!
I tried to report an email extortion, so I called the FBI. They took the report, and told me to go to a website for reporting cybercrimes. The website did not allow me to either send the email to their address, or to upload an eml. The web page asked me to copy and paste the email, with headers, into a text box on the website. The textbox had a maximum number characters too small to enable me to even put the entire “To:” field in. I was appalled.