Those pesky scammers are up to no good once again!

It seems that now, a cryptocurrency fan has sent out a warning that scammers are posing as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to trick you into sending over your Bitcoin. $10,000 worth of Bitcoin to be exact.

In a Reddit post published earlier this week, we can see that the user ‘sajber’ has been sent an email from the ‘CIA’ and posted a screenshot of the email campaign which you can see here. The idea of the campaign is clearly to fool people into thinking that they are the subject of a federal crime on a global scale.

The scammers attempt to get their details by saying that the victim is in a database related to a police operation which is getting set to arrest more than 2,000 individuals who are ‘suspected’ of being a paedophile across 27 countries.

Of course, this is a very serious crime, but not to worry as it can all go away if you transfer $10,000 worth of Bitcoin to the listed address in the email. I didn’t think the CIA were THAT corrupt? Well apparently the federal agent on the case, Hong Lees is as he is going to let people off the hook for their ‘crimes’ if they pay him… er I mean, the CIA $10,000 worth in Bitcoin.

The email lists cryptocurrency exchanges Bitstamp, Coinbase and Coinmama as examples of where the potential victims can buy their Bitcoin and transfer it over to him.

The scam email also states that Lees will need a few days to access and edit the files to remove all evidence of your ‘crimes’.

Funnily enough, one of the Crypto Daily team got a very similar email the other day with the same premise but they just ignored it and got on with their day. This is exactly what you should do if you got this kind of email sent to you, just ignore it.

As reported by TNW, this email scam is a slight change from the ‘Bitcoin sextortion’ scam. This fraud was based on the idea that a ‘magic pixel’ was somehow integrated into the target’s machine then recorded the victim doing ‘unspeakable acts’ (think of Black Mirror’s Shut Up and Dance episode). So if you paid around $2,000 in Bitcoin to the scammers then the video(s) wouldn’t get released to the public. This is a lot less than $10,000 but either way, it’s all just a big scam in order to get some Bitcoin from some gullible fool.