I received an email that said I've been hacked

Yes, I read that — but since there’s no evidence of a misspelled “iCloud” in the OP’s post, and you weren’t privy to the raw source, I don’t understand where this misspelling is evident.

Possibly, if the OP wasn’t aware of how to discern a capital “i” from a lower case “L” in “iCloud”, and you summarily claimed that was the case, isn’t there a possibility that, due to your level and points, the OP assumed you nailed it? A sort of ‘argument from authority’ scenario? The email I received doesn’t show such a misspelling, but maybe the scammer read this thread and decided to patch the hole?

My aim here is to learn how to assess an email as fraudulent, and your claim based on someone else’s claim doesn’t help me get there. Would you mind being a bit more helpful? What about DMARC and quarantine?

Just want to add this post to note that while it could be the case, in this instance, it's not the case. A force-capitalisation of the "iCloud" copy-pasted from the original post shows that it is, in fact, an L. Just for those who are seeing this and thinking "Omg mine's an actual L, my email asking for money must be real!" Regardless though, the email address appearing to be real does not make it real. People can make an email seem like it is coming from an address that it is not.

Thanks for this observation about the i versus the l - you have good eyes!

Just delete it and move on.

Thank god I was scared ********

I had the exact same mail and exact same wallet adress, but the amount was 1500 us dollars.

Well, I’m biased, but I like all 3 books of his trilogy; Singlarity, Dualism, and Tripoldy (I get credits in them, and one of the characters is loosely based on me). In the tradition of technothrillers, in each one the hero and heroine jointly have to save the world. As there’s a sequel for the first two, at least, it’s not a spoiler to say they do.

In Singularity the mcguffin is based on the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis; No less than astrophysicist Kip Thorne (who won a bet against Stephen Hawking once) liked it and considered the physics plausible. And Jackson once debated the author at a NASA gathering.

Dualism is suddenly very timely; the mcguffin is a sentient AI.

Did anything happen? I received this same email. I reset my password, and looked in my sent and deleted items to see if the email really was sent from my account. I couldn't find it anywhere. I'm not worried about the videos they mention in the email because I can assure you there are none of the videos described; however, I obviously don't want any videos sent to my contacts.

Yes! I received an email just like that. At first, I was scared because it looked legitimate, and because they "sent" the email from "my own iCloud". But, don't worry. It's a scam and they're not hurting you. Please, don't pay, and delete it from your email.

Hi, I just received the same exact email. Starting of the email is a scam. The licence cost of operating pegasus is more than 500k. It is only used to hack politicians and high ranking government oficials. Further more the email claims to have been sent from your own icloud, to trick you into thinking that, the scammer put your email address in the description of the email to make it look as if it was sent from your own email

Word for word, except the amount is much higher 1150. But you can't blame the hacker because the price of everything has gone up. The email came for **@dsl.com.

Even if I thought it were for real, I wouldn't care if they sent these "sick perversion" videos to everyone I know.

[Edited by Moderator]

Simiooo wrote:

I got the same email on Wednesday, I opened it today tho, what happened after 48 hours for you?

Nothing. For many months.

But if you want or need to believe the scammers and their claims, you could certainly choose to pay off the scammers. Which will encourage more spam and more scams sent everywhere more generally, and will more specifically make you a far more valuable target to re-sell your info for further re-scamming.

And of course, your pay off is also completely dependent on the scammers being completely truthful and honest, because scammers are always truthful and honest. And scammers never return to you for more money. And scammers never re-sell your willingness to pay to other scammers, and of course scammers will never resell those photos you want to believe they have to others anyway.

Parker certainly re-sold the Brooklyn Bridge, after all.

It's an oldie, but still an effective one.

On a computer you can choose to view the raw message, which displays it in a basic monospaced serif font; there the difference between eye and ell is obvious.

Did the OP share the raw email with you? I received the same email, and neither it nor the OP’s post show a misspelling of iCloud in the email body.

Doesn’t more definitive evidence reside in the raw header information with such flags as DMARC info and/or quarantine status, as seen here in the identical email in my Junk folder?

No hostility intended — I’m trying to determine how you arrived at your assessment with (ostensibly) only the OP’s pasted email body text. If it was deductive, by citing traits commonly found in other, unrelated junk email, then us recipients aren’t any better armed to make our own assessments going forward. ✌🏼