Public healthcare staff receive extortion emails with doctored obscene images of themselves

SINGAPORE: Some staff from Singapore’s public healthcare institutions have received extortionary emails containing fake obscene images of themselves.

The manipulated images had superimposed publicly sourced pictures of the victims’ faces on obscene screenshots of a man and a woman “purportedly in an intimate and compromising situation”, said the Ministry of Health (MOH) on Thursday (Nov 28).

MOH said it was alerted to the incident on Tuesday.

“The emails were sent from multiple email addresses and threatened to expose the images unless a ransom was paid,” said the ministry.

“All affected individuals have been advised to file reports with the police. No monetary loss has been reported from the affected individuals.”

MOH has alerted all its public healthcare institutions, statutory boards, and staff to report similar extortionary emails to the police if they receive them.

“MOH and our healthcare clusters adopt a zero-tolerance stance against any form of staff harassment and abuse, and strongly condemn this malicious act against our healthcare workers and their families,” added the ministry.

In a separate news release on Wednesday, the police said there have been recent cases of extortionary emails, with the images manipulated in an identical way.

In end-November, the police received more than 20 such reports. The emails warned of threatening consequences unless the victims transferred 50,000 USDT (US$50,000) to a cryptocurrency e-wallet account provided in the email.

“Based on the current cases, the emails would be sent to the victims’ work email addresses,” the police added.

“Based on preliminary investigations, the information of the victims, such as photographs and work email addresses, were believed to be obtained from publicly available online sources.”

Police investigations are ongoing.