E-Whoring: Darker Way to Earn Money

Introduction

E-whoring is surely becoming one of the most common methods for beginner cyber criminals to gain easy money. E-whoring is a practice of selling pornographic content, while pretending to be the person, usually girl, photographed. It is considered a form of social engineering, when the victim is misled to believe he is interacting with a girl who is sending him nude photos and video clips of herself. Basically in E-whoring someone pretend to be a girl in a chat room. Then he talks to guys and ask them to sign up to his affiliate program, usually an adult affiliate program, and once they sign up he get paid.

E-Whoring is a social engineering technique, where scammer pretend to be a pretty girl in order to swindled internet users. Now a day’s E-Whoring becomes a very popular online scamming technique which involves the scammer interacting with the mark online under the pretence of being a girl who sells her body online. The most common way of monetizing from this is for the scammer to ask the mark for money in return for pictures, videos, and cam shows articles of clothing. E-whores also use forums to exchange e-whore packages; that is, videos and pictures of girls. Some are given for free and the higher quality ones are for sale.

How does it work?

The principle is as follows:

• The scammer creates one or more fake profiles of young girl with a hot picture.
• The scammer tries to lure victims by mail, via a social network or dating sites by adding his victims as a friend.
• Then he invites them to join a webcam conversation via a link to an online subscription form, for a third party service.
• The scammer receives a commission for each validated form.
• In some cases, the scammer calls the victim to undress in front of his webcam and finally blackmail him by threatening to publish this video on the internet.

How scammers Start E-Whoring?

Making money through e-whoring does not require great technological sophistication, but rather, success depends on social engineering skills. The challenge is to get the victims, to believe they are talking to an actual girl. The things they used to begin E-Whoring are as follows:

• VPN

To prevent disclosure of private information VPN is used. This keeps them safe. VPN hides IP address and present a different one. There are several free VPN’s some of them are as follow:

• ProXPN
• OpenVPN
• VPNReactor

But most of time they use paid VPN’s to become more secure because these VPNs saves no logs or delete logs after a short time period.

• Fake Identity

First they generate a fake identity. While thinking about the identity they write down the things to make their story consistent.

They use the following sites to generate the fake identity:

• www.datafakegenerator.com/generador.php
• www.fakenamegenerator.com

With these websites Scammer generate names, addresses, social security numbers, credit card numbers, occupations, UPS tracking numbers, and more absolutely free.

• Setting up Fake Skype, MSN, PayPal account and e-mail

They create fake Skype, MSN, PayPal and email by finding an address on Google maps in the city the VPN is located. Then they create fake Facebook profile with their fake email and non-nude pictures in albums. Now they fill out their info in PayPal, and they are ready to camp.

• E-Whoring packages

Attacker creates or downloads some E-Whoring packages, like some photos or videos with pornographic material then only he can starts e-whoring.

• Make clients

Scammers have two options in looking for their potential clients. They can either post an ad on sites like Craigslist or go into a chat room.

• Set Prices

Scammers always know how to setting a price, if someone says I’m unemployed then they starts low, if someone says they are a rich businessman then they starts high.

• Use Tool like Manycam

Manycam is a tool which E-Whores use to have cam sessions with their marks. It’s an extremely useful program which lets them to broadcast their video files over webcam.

• Blackmail

If nothing works then scammers starts blackmailing the victim. Blackmail is an act, in which the grifter threatens to use revealing, damaging, embarrassing, secretive etc information in order to get money or other kind of cooperation out of the mark. For doing blackmail they starts information gathering. Their main aim is to find the more and more information about the victim; they tries to find out the email ids of the person, Social networking accounts related to these email ids, location etc. As the get the sufficient information about the victim they send mail and ask victim to transfer money else they make the chat logs and videos public or to publish video on the internet.

Recent Incidence

Here is the recent incidence in which the identity of the law student stolen by the hackers and started using it to make money in an ‘e-whoring’ scam. Her Facebook was also hacked and pictures and information used to set up fake accounts advertising her as a prostitute.

A Facebook spokesman said about this incident: 'We take our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities very seriously and react quickly to remove reported content that violates our policies. The goal of these policies is to strike a very delicate balance between giving people the freedom to express them and maintaining a safe and trusted environment. We encourage people to report anything they feel violates our policies using the report links located throughout the site or by using the reporting tools in our Help Centre at facebook.com/report.'

How to protect yourself from E-Whoring?

· Be aware of social engineering attacks.

· More important data should be locked up, so that any hacker is not able to access your personal files.

· If a girl does not know you, try to seduce you, be cautious.

· If a girl is half naked, it's a scam.

Conclusion

Now a day’s E-Whoring becomes a very popular online scamming technique which involves the scammer interacting with the mark online under the pretence of being a girl who sells her body online. The most common way of monetizing from this is for the scammer to ask the mark for money in return for pictures, videos, and cam shows articles of clothing.It’s so easy to get drown in these kind of incidents, as we don’t know about the people around us. We should not trust any person online because we are unaware of the intensions they are holding. As online scamming can damage your public image or can damage your personal life as well. In this article, whole scenarios is defined which can help you to understand the term as well as its effect.