What you need to know – NBC10 Philadelphia

Women in the Philadelphia area are warning others about emails from scammers who claim to have compromising photos of them and threaten them with blackmail while showing photos of homes they used to live in.

Kierra Howell told NBC10 she was scrolling through her inbox when she noticed an email from an unknown sender.

“I opened it and it’s just like this long message saying they’ve tracked my phone. They were able to look into my camera, watch what I was doing and send me a photo of the front of my old house,” she said.

Howell said the sender demanded $1,950 in Bitcoin and threatened to send revealing footage of her to others if she didn’t pay.

“It was a little scary,” Howell said.

Lindsey Clark told NBC10 she also received a similar email from someone claiming to know where she lived, showing a street view of a house and threatening to release compromising videos of her.

Rob D’Ovidio, an associate professor of criminology and justice studies at Drexel University, told NBC10 both women were the target of what the security industry is calling the “Google Street View scam.”

D’Ovidio said the scammers claim they have intimate images to intimidate and intimidate people into sending them money.

“One way to distinguish between the fraud and the actual case of sextortion is for them to present you with evidence of what they have to compel that payment,” D’ovidio said.

D’Ovidio told NBC10 that there is a quick way to check any suspicious emails you receive.

“Take snippets of that email, copy it and put it in Google,” D’Ovidio said. “See if other people receive the same email. If you find that this is the case, if the search results tell you this is the case, it is probably not legitimate.”

NBC10 copied portions of the emails Howell and Clark received and pasted them into a Google search. The results showed a warning from Maryland State Police about the same type of email. A post on a Philadelphia Facebook page also showed others receiving the same message. Dozens of responses speculated about how the emails ended up in her inbox.

“It went to my personal email with my phone number. But it was actually directed at one of my friends who lives in Boston, Massachusetts,” Clark said.

As Clark tried to make sense of it, she noticed someone in the comments asking if the email recipients had ordered from Philadelphia-based Di Bruno Bros.

“And then it clicked for me because my girlfriend got engaged in 2022 and I sent her one of her gift boxes as a congratulation,” she said.

Howell told NBC10 that her email has been on Di Bruno’s mailing list for about five years.

“I didn’t get anything delivered from them,” Howell said. “It really took a lot of time.”

Another person told NBC10 that she and her fiancé both received the same threatening email. But instead of her address, it showed the home of her future in-laws. The couple said they used Di Bruno Bros. to ship gift boxes in December 2021.

NBC10 has reached out to the company for comment.

“Di Bruno Bros. was acquired by DB Gourmet Markets LLC in 2024. We recently became aware of the matter when our customers contacted us,” a spokesperson told us. “Although our investigation into this issue is ongoing, we believe that customers’ email addresses may have been obtained as a result of a third-party data breach in 2023. I conducted a security audit and experienced the data breach.”

NBC10 also reached out to the previous owners of Di Bruno Bros. They declined to comment and referred us to the new owner’s statement.

When we asked the Di Bruno Bros. to tell us more about the possible data breach and the third party involved, a spokesperson declined to elaborate.

Meanwhile, Clark tries to warn others about the scam.

“I was perhaps aware that that was a range,” she said. “But for the countless other people who may have felt fear or shame and just thought, ‘I have to pay for this to stop.’ And it’s just like taking advantage of people.”

If you received a similar scam email, report it to the FBI Tips website here.