Many of you have probably received the poorly worded, bad English email the last few years saying they’ve been recording your indecent behavior in front of your webcam and unless you pay them using Bitcoin they will release the video to your family to bring shame to your family name 😂.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Twice in the last week in my Inbox (and so new Google’s spam filter is just now recognizing it as spam). I received basically the same email but with a much more sophisticated twist. In my case it was just my name, address and phone number in the message body (with all data breaches over the years your basic information is available as well). And that’s it except for a PDF attachment, which if you open it (I did so you don’t have to) the first thing you see is a Google Maps street view of your home, followed by a page and a half of proper English with sentences like “Well, You’ve been a bit careless lately, scrolling through those filthy videos and venturing into the darker corners of cyberspace…” and “Laurie, if I suspect that you’ve shared or discussed this email with someone else, your garbage will instantly start getting sent to your contacts.”

Oh no, oh no! What shall I do?

Well obviously, just delete it. The PDF itself doesn’t appear to contain any malware (but as always you shouldn’t open attachments you aren’t expecting), it’s just an attempt to frighten you into sending money to total strangers (they wanted $2,000 for my “peace of mind”).

Obviously this will only scare people who have in fact been watching porn on their computer and actually believe they were caught on film being as the letter puts it “disgusting”.  It must work for uninformed porn watchers because someone is sending them money, that’s why they keep doing this.

So don’t freak out when you see this, AI has cleaned up all those messages of horrible English and bad grammar, but it’s still the same scam, just all cleaned up.