NIAGARA COUNTY, N.Y. — Potential scammers continue to find ways to target people online. One of the latest scams going around involves sending you photos of your own home.
Thursday morning, the Niagara County Sheriff's Office posted a warning for its Facebook followers about an online scam. Scammers are now using street view photos found online of people's homes to scare them into giving up their personal information and money.
"The email starts with a photo of your home to try to show you that they know where you live. And then it goes on to say that they've installed spyware on your devices and they've captured inappropriate images of you that you wouldn't want shared," says Katarina Schmieder, Communications Director of the Better Business Bureau of Upstate New York.
Schmieder says that potential scammers then go on to say that if you don't send payment via Bitcoin, they will share those photos with your contacts.
"The fact that this not only includes a threat, but a picture of where you live is putting people on edge," Schmieder said.
She says the goal is to scare you into quickly giving into their demands, and if you get a message like this, you need to pause and realize it's a scam.
"The odds of them having any of this material are slim to none. I mean, if they had any of those images, they would have shared them with you in that initial contact," Schmieder said.
If you've already been targeted, you aren't alone. The BBB says reports of phishing scams more than doubled from 2022 to 2023, and we're on pace to break another record this year.
"Make sure you're using a long, strong password and multi-factor authentication on all of your accounts, do a regular privacy checkup, make sure you're changing passwords for everything, monitoring your bank accounts, your credit cards statements to check for any fraudulent activity. That's something you should be doing regularly in general, not just when you encounter a scam like this," Schmieder said.