#WeekendWisdom 033 Sextortion through Dating Apps
Welcome to #WeekendWisdom number 33. This week we’re going to talk about Sextortion through Dating Apps.
I will talk about sextortion through email, which is much more common, in a future one of these.
Where did you come across this sextortion through dating apps thing?
The good folks over at the Internet Storm Center put up a post this week talking about an online forum that they have discovered. The posts on this forum are full of details about people and these details are coming from dating apps.
What are the evil doers doing?
What the criminals are doing is they are creating lots and lots of fake profiles on dating sites and dating apps. Then when they get connected with their victims, which are nearly always men, they will get into conversations with them. They will ask them what their sexual preferences are. What they like doing. They will try to get them to virtually cheat on their partners, etc. They gather all of this information and they put it into a post on this online forum which is actually in the public domain.
Then what they do is contact the victim and say “If you want us to take down this post with all your sexual preferences, etc., this embarrassing information, pay us some money.” And they do apparently do this when they are paid money.
What’s the problem then?
But the thing is these sites have been in the public domain, they might be indexed by Google or they might be also in an internet archive. So that information is still up and is probably still in the public domain.
What can I do to protect myself?
So it’s just a case of being very careful about who you contact and who you can converse with on these dating sites.
So that’s it for this week. Let’s be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.
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