So I got an email this morning from some person or persons unknown stating that on such-and-such a date, I visited such-and-such a pornographic website–and unless I pay them off in Bitcoin–uh-huh: like I have any Bitcoin, or know what it is, or care–they’ll tell all my friends and everybody else who knows me. They also claimed I used such-and-such a password, but the password they cited belongs to no one I know of.
What we have here is a criminal offense: attempted blackmail. We are advised to delete the message and run a virus scan, which we have done.
There are a jillion porn sites on the Internet and it’s not hard to stumble onto one of them while looking for something else. All it takes, sometimes, is the smallest of typos. So the blackmailers are on pretty firm ground there: just about everyone has visited a porn site, if you count accidents as visits.
Now, why didn’t we call the police? Only because I doubt the cops could catch these vermin. If they could be caught, they’d have been caught already.
If you receive one of these messages, don’t be afraid. Just delete it and run a virus scan. It would probably be most unwise to reply to the message in any way. So please don’t do that!