From an article titled “Beware of blackmail and sextortion emails threatening to expose your personal information”, you’ll get a better idea of these scams.
These emails will often appear to have been sent to you from your own email address, creating the illusion that your email has been hacked.
It’s likely that the scammer has spoofed your email address, this is where the true sender ID is masked by the scammer. Spoofing doesn’t mean your account has been hacked.
Spoofing is quite common; however, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies allowed these SPOOFERS to capitalize off of Spoofing because if you allow the spoofer to scare you into sending them Money, it’s almost impossible for you to get your Bitcoins back, whereas in the past, these spoofers would use Paypal or some other monitored payment platform and then the spoofers would often be stopped, from repeating the process.
The “You’ve been hacked email” has been going for several years now, because a lot of the people using Bitcoin are not sophisticated, so they’ll often assume that they have been hacked and so they send these scammers Bitcoins.
A lot of people get scammed in the cryptocurrency market and there’s a lot of SHAMING in the crypto world when people get scammed, so a lot of people who have been scammed out of their crypto often stay silent, I write this because that’s the market these spoofers are targeting, so if you own Bitcoin, don’t ever send money to someone you don’t know or trust.