Black Mirror fans will immediately think of ‘Shut Up and Dance’
An email scam is doing the rounds in which the ‘hacker’ claim to have one of your old computer passwords and video footage of you watching pornography, as reported by Business Insider.
They then demand that you pay them a certain amount of Bitcoin, threatening to send the footage to your friends, family members, colleagues and other contacts.
Unsuspecting victims have been receiving messages that contain an old password in the subject line, before the email then details the steps required to send a payment within 24 hours before the video is released.
In certain instances, the ‘hacker’ claims to have evidence of the victim committing adultery instead.
The truth is the hackers have absolutely nothing, obviously, and have simply obtained an old password through the kind of data breach that has happened on Facebook, LinkedIn, eBay and Yahoo in the past.
According to BleepingComputer.com, some of the scammers have made over $50,000 in one week using this scare tactic.
Black Mirror fans will find the scam eerily similar to the one that takes place in ‘Shut Up and Dance’ in Season 3 of the cult series.
*spoiler alert*
The episode tells the story of a young teenage boy who is blackmailed by a hacker who claims to have footage of him masturbating. After performing a bizarre array of criminal acts to avoid the video being released, the boy eventually realises it was all for nothing after his hysteric mother phones him to reveal his sister has seen the video and she knows he was watching child pornography.
As he ends the call he is arrested by police
As far as twist endings go, ‘Shut Up and Dance’ is an absolute sucker punch, even by Black Mirror standards.
Longstanding fans of the series will not be surprised to see its dark predictions for technology and the human race blur into real life after China introduced a social ranking system mimicking the one shown in another season 3 episode, ‘Nosedive’, last year.
