Have you received an email which starts off by listing one of your passwords and then goes on to indicate that a video recording of you watching an adult content video which will be sent to your friends unless you pay a few thousand dollars in bitcoin? Please don’t believe everything you read. Emails like this are scams. The first report I received of this type of scam email was in July 2018. Soon thereafter this article about sextortion scam emails appeared on Sophos’ website. Sophos is a British security company. The one truthful part of the email is that the spammers do possess one of your passwords. If you still use that password, please change it anywhere you use it. That’s all you need to do. Everything else in the email is bogus. Nobody installed spyware on your Mac. Nobody has video recordings of you.

Here are some additional actions you could take:

• If you’d like to be safe, please scan your Mac using Malwarebytes.

• If you’d like to report this attempted extortion then please report it to the FBI using their IC3 (Internet Crime Complaint Center) web site, perhaps in the Internet Extortion section.
• If you’re like to read more about the history of this sort of scam read this article at The Parallax.