Scammers on the internet are looking for new ways to get away with it, and it seems they’ve found another goldmine. Their new plan is to make you believe that your partner is cheating on you so that you end up falling into the trap they’ve set for you. What do you need to know to avoid becoming their next online victim?
Just what we needed. Cybercriminals don’t miss any opportunity to scam us. They’ve seen that crimes in which they threaten to air your dirty laundry (usually of an adult nature) don’t work as well as they used to, so they’ve decided to change their mindset. And now what they’ve thought of is changing their style and involving, in a totally false way, of course, your partner.
Your wife or husband is being unfaithful to you
The email behind this scam is straightforward and very clear: the person writing to you has information about how your partner is cheating on you. The scam begs to be ignored, but it’s possible that there’s something about it that makes you afraid, suspicious, or maybe you stop thinking and end up falling for it. One of the reasons why this can happen is that the email sent by the scammers not only includes your name, but also that of your partner.
And, as one Reddit user who experienced it says, they even refer to the partner’s second surname, something that is very rare in the United States and other countries. Therefore, from the very first moment, the seed of doubt is planted that can lead to you being scammed in a matter of minutes.
What happens next?
What the scammer is doing is saying that they will give you full access to the evidence that proves your partner is cheating on you. To make accessing it easier, the scammer has created a website where, theoretically, the victim can access these confidential files. Of course, you can imagine that it is all part of the usual scam of getting you to click on a link, download malware, enter credit card details or whatever.
The promised data includes a complete copy of the cheater’s hard drive, with their calendar, dating app usage history, browser history, calls, and any other type of data that can corroborate what they claim. To give more credibility to the email, it appears that the message comes from an address that is impersonating an email from a data-specialized company, which gives more credibility to the scam.
So far, these emails have been shared by several people in the United States. However, it is very possible that they will start appearing in other languages and that they will end up becoming the next big scam. What these criminals want is to infect computers or steal banking data and other sensitive information. The problem is that they start with the private data they already have on their victims, such as first names, last names, partner information or maiden names. This gives credibility to the situation and there are already people who have clicked on the link, as can also be read on Reddit.
Among the people who have clicked, it is mentioned that, after that, they had to enter their data and possibly the system would take them to a gateway to make a payment. In the case of a fairly simple scam and a single attack, they would try to charge them for a report that would never reach its destination, but it is possible that this extortion was prolonged over time or that there was malware involved. Therefore, you should always avoid trusting these types of strange messages that you can receive from people you do not know at all. Thus, if someone tells you in an email that your partner is cheating on you and that you should click on a link, the best thing to do is to ignore it, delete it and get on with your life.
