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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

This type of scam is so lazy and obvious I'm surprised it's not been reported before. Anyone with your name and approximate location, provided your name isn't something insanely common like John Johnson, can yield your address within a few minutes. Seems like just a variation of the "I have your IP address" scams prevalent in IRC a long ass time ago, even the tone of the letter sounds the exact same.

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It is the type of thing nobody thinks about though. Sure it is easy to figure out where I live (though odds are good you will get a previous address), but most people never attempt to do that and so don't realize how easy it is. It seems like if you know where I live you just have gone through a lot of effort. I have no doubt someone could break into my house and install hidden cameras without leaving a trace, but it would be a lot of effort, and it seems like the hardest part is finding my house.

>I have no doubt someone could break into my house and install hidden cameras without leaving a trace

Yes, but it feels like it would be hard to do that without the risk of witnesses. Sure, you could probably muddy the waters by claiming to be official or something, but it only takes one person to actually check your credentials or call the cops or even just tell the person "Hey this person went into your house, did you hire them?" to blow up your spot.

Pretty much all of your examples require some level of home surveillance, either neighbors or a good camera system. If you don't have nosey neighbors and don't have alerting cameras, it would be almost trivial to pick a standard lock and place a few small mics or pinhole cameras while the house is empty during work/school hours.

The real deterent here is that nobody cares enough about some random normal person to do this. It's much easier to send email spam to trick a tiny percentage of gullible people into believing it and paying up.

If someone is going to do a B&E on your house then they have many better options of getting a payday than some weaksauce sextortion scheme. And worse, law enforcement might actually care enough to investigate if you're going that far out of your way. High risk low reward. It's a bad scheme.

Weirdly getting the Google street view of my house makes the threat seem less credible. If they have the ability to send me a picture and they don't include one of the blackmail shots as proof and instead just something easily scraped from the web then they've already shown that they have nothing. At least when these threats were text only there was a plausible reason why they wouldn't send the proof right from the start and if people aren't thinking about it they might not realize that the scammer has provided basically zero details that aren't public knowledge. Sending the useless picture just highlights the scam.

Congratulations, you are not the target of the scam. Unfortunately, if they get 1/1000 people to not think this critically, they'll keep trying...

Ten years ago someone told me that you can find out where someone lives by typing their name into Google Maps. I tried it on a few friends and it was shockingly accurate. I was completely mystified by how it worked (we were all college kids and none of us owned property) Doesn't seem to work any more though.

There used to be these books available that had a compiled list of everyone in town and it included their address and phone number. It was huge.

The cornerstone of social engineering and phreaking.

Assuming you are referring to phone books white/yellow pages, which do still exist - the major difference being of course that these could be trivially opted out of by calling the phone company. These days, you cannot come even close to reliably opting out of the digital “phone book” and it contains much more than your name, number, and address.

Mostly being facetious. But at the time, I never knew someone who opted out. It just wasn't seen as a danger. It was a great way to find Doc Brown or Sarah Connor.

How did it work? Did Google get recorder of deeds records?

It's lazy but they only need it to work on a few people via shotgun approach of spam.

Honestly, it’s just not a common knowledge. I still can shock people by telling there are practically free versions of Clearview-like services online. Like finding people in random pictures by doing a reverse image search.

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