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These online extortion scams have surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, and scams are precisely what they are, coming in many flavors.

Perhaps the most common being the sextortion email that demands money to prevent compromising sexual material being sent to friends, family and work colleagues.

The perpetrator will suggest that they are a successful hacker who has not only gained access to your computer but installed malware to record your activity, including taking control of your webcam.

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Whats more, to validate their hacking credentials, they will present you with a username and password that you will likely recognize as being one that you use.

This is the point at which the recipient panics and sends me an email asking what they can do.

Ill share the answer here, so if you experience this, you can skip sending me an email.

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If they were such an elite hacker, why are they sending you an email instead of simply locking you out of the computer they supposedly have full control over Ransomware, along with data exfiltration for extra payment leverage, is the cybercrime dish du jour.

Not the most secure practice, but far and away the norm for most users.

If you recognize the password, then you are doing passwords wrong as well: its either simple enough to remember or one that, like the username, you use for everything.

Your panic is a knee-jerk reaction, a gut-wrenching one that the scammer is relying on to make you throw common sense out of the window and do whatever it is they ask.

Thats still more secure than simply having the same username for everything.

For services that require your email address as a username, its possible to create unique addresses for each.

But its also pretty easy for anyone by using a web-based email service such as Gmail to create a new email account.

Those emails can then be forwarded to your primary inbox for ease of use.

If you have been caught out and paid up, then report the incident to your local FBI field office in the U.S.

U.K. If, as I hope, you have spotted the scam in time then you should still report it.

This time, however, to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in the U.S.

Action Fraud, the National Fraud and Cyber Crime Reporting Centre, in the U.K.

Davey Winder Im a three-decade veteran technology journalist and have been a contributing editor at PC Pro magazine since the first issue in 1994.

A three-time winner of the BT Read More Im a three-decade veteran technology journalist and have been a contributing editor at PC Pro magazine since the first issue in 1994.

A three-time winner of the BT Security Journalist of the Year award (2006, 2008, 2010) I was also fortunate enough to be named BT Technology Journalist of the Year in 1996 for a forward-looking feature in PC Pro called Threats to the Internet.

In 2011 I was honored with the Enigma Award for a lifetime contribution to IT security journalism.

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