That blackmail email knows your name and old address. It's still fake

This one lands differently to a parcel text. It arrives by email, it is written in flawless English, and it opens with something true: your full name. Sometimes your date of birth. Sometimes an address you lived at years ago, or a password you genuinely used to use. Then it claims to have recorded you through your webcam visiting adult websites, and demands payment in Bitcoin within a deadline - or the video goes to everyone you know.

The true details are the whole trick. A scam that knows your birthday feels like it must know everything else it claims. It doesn't.

Where they really got your details

Over the past decade, dozens of large companies have had customer databases stolen - names, birthdates, addresses, phone numbers, and passwords, sometimes from services people signed up to fifteen years ago. Those stolen databases are traded cheaply among criminals, who feed them into mass email tools. That's why the address is often an old one: the leak predates your move. The scammer has never seen your screen. They bought a spreadsheet.

Why you can be sure there's no video

1. It's a mass mailing. The same email, word for word, goes to thousands of addresses from the same breach. Only the personal details are swapped in. Search any distinctive sentence from it and you'll find hundreds of identical reports.
2. There is never proof. Someone who truly had footage would attach a frame of it. These emails never do, because it doesn't exist.
3. Payment is only ever crypto. Bitcoin, with a deadline, and instructions not to reply or contact police - the standard machinery of a bluff that cannot survive a moment's checking.
4. The grammar is perfect now. The old advice - "look for spelling mistakes" - is finished. These are machine-written. Polish is not proof of legitimacy; the pattern is what gives it away.

What to do

Don't pay - people who pay get asked again. Don't reply - a reply marks your address as live and invites more. Report it at Scamwatch (the reporting service of the ACCC's National Anti-Scam Centre), then delete it. If it quoted a password you still use anywhere, change that password today and turn on multi-factor authentication. If you're worried about how much of your identity is out there, IDCARE (1800 595 160) is Australia's free national identity support service.

The person you worry about

Now imagine this email arriving for a parent in their seventies - addressed to them, knowing their birthday. That is who these are aimed at, and shame is the weapon: it's exactly the scam people don't ask their family about. Forward It exists so they don't have to explain anything. They forward the email to one saved address, and a calm answer comes straight back: it's a mass blackmail email, there is no video, your details came from an old data leak, don't pay. No conversation required. You can also paste any suspicious message into our free checker right now.

Common questions