Philly-area women warn of Google Street View sextortion scam

Women in the Philadelphia area are warning others about emails from scammers claiming to have compromising photos of them and threatening to extort them 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 unfamiliar sender.

“I opened it up and it’s just like this long message saying they tracked my phone. They could see inside my camera, watch what I’ve been doing, and like, sent a picture of the front of my old place,” she said.

Howell said the sender demanded $1950 in bitcoin and threatened to send revealing footage of her to others if she didn’t pay.

“It was like a little scary,” Howell said.

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

Rob D’Ovidio, Associate Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies at Drexel University, told NBC10 both women were the target of what the security industry is referring to as “The Google Street View Scam.”

D’Ovidio said the scammers claim they have intimate pictures in order to scare and intimidate people into sending them money.  

“One of the ways to distinguish between the scam and the real case of sextortion is that they’re going to give you some sort of evidence of what they have in order to force that payment,” D’Ovidio said.

D’Ovidio told NBC10 there’s a quick way to check any suspicious email you receive.

“Take snippets from that email, copy it, put it into Google,” D’Ovidio said. “See if other people are getting the same email. If you find that’s the case, if the search results tell you that’s the case, chances are it’s not legitimate.”

NBC10 copied and pasted parts of the emails Howell and Clark received into a Google search. The results showed a warning from Maryland State Police about the same type of email. A post on a Philadelphia-based Facebook page also showed others were getting the same message. Dozens of replies speculated about how the emails landed in their inbox.

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

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

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

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

“I haven’t gotten anything delivered from them,” Howell said. “It’s been like a good amount of time.”

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

NBC10 reached out to the company for comment.

“The Di Bruno Bros. company was acquired by DB Gourmet Markets LLC in 2024. We recently became aware of this matter when our customers reached out to us,” a spokesperson told us. “Although our investigation into this issue is ongoing, we believe customers’ email addresses may have been obtained as the result of a data breach of a third-party service provider that occurred in 2023. The third-party, retained by the previous ownership to conduct a security audit, had experienced the data breach.”

NBC10 also reached out to the previous owners of Di Bruno Bros. They did not want to comment and referred us back to the new owner’s statement.

When we asked Di Bruno Bros. to tell us more about the possible data breach and the third party involved, a spokesperson would not elaborate.

Clark, meanwhile, is trying to warn others about the scam.

“I may have been aware that this is spam,” she said. “But for the countless other people that may have felt fear or shame and just felt like, ‘I need to pay this to get it to stop.’ And it’s just like, you’re taking advantage of people.”

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