A new variation of the ‘sextortion‘ spam has been seen in the wild, this time in the context of tax evasion.

This extortion variant has many similarities with the previous ‘sextortion’ and ‘bomb extortion’ type spam. It may say that your device is infected with malware, that the email is ‘bugged’ so that they know when you have read it, that contacting the authorities won’t help, and will always contain a demand for bitcoin along with a bitcoin wallet address.

The appearance of this iteration of sextortion is likely due to tax season coming up. Email service operators should inform their customers of potentially receiving these scam emails, and to simply ignore them. These emails are a little bit harder to filter than the average spam message as they can come from many sources, such as Freemail servers or compromised accounts/servers. Strong filtering tools such as MagicSpam Pro can aid in the battle against extortion email scams.