A word of warning: there's a new porn email scam that uses people's old passwords and phone numbers to scare them into thinking a hacker has taken over their computers.

On Wednesday, security researchers at Cisco's Talos group reported that scammers have made at least $146,000 by circulating the sextortion messages. It works like this: You'll receive an email that claims to have filmed you watching porn. If you don't pay up in Bitcoin, the hacker will send the embarrassing video to your family or spouse.

The scheme itself is nothing new. But lately, scammers have been upgrading their tactics. To trick you into believing their threats, they'll include an old password or phone number that actually belongs to you.

"I am well aware randy55 one of your password," the email might say, before demanding up to $7,000 in bitcoin.

As the sender's atrocious grammar might suggest, the threat is all a ruse. The scammers know nothing about you, nor have they secretly infected your computer with malware. They've merely harvested your old password or phone number from past data breaches, which can found online in shady corners of the internet.

Cisco Talos researchers have been investigating the scam, which dates back to at least June. To find out how much the scheme has been raking in, they looked at 230,000 of sextortion messages that were filtered by SpamCop from Aug. 30 to Oct. 26.

Each message included a Bitcoin wallet address as a way to let the victim forward the ransom payment to the spammers. Researchers looked through thousands of addresses and discovered that only 83 wallets had a positive balance. But in total, the wallets had amassed up to 23 bitcoin, or about $146,000.

"That isn't too bad considering the attackers have only been distributing this particular scam for roughly 60 days, and do not actually possess any compromising material concerning the victim," the researchers said.

The spammers have also been persistent. On average, they bombard victims with about 15 sextortion messages. "One unlucky victim from our dataset was contacted a staggering 354 times," the researchers added.

Cisco Talos released its findings weeks after IBM researchers also warned about the porn scam, which they said has been circulating through millions of emails in different languages including English, French, and Japanese.

According to IBM, an infamous botnet called Necurs may be sending the messages. The botnet is believed to have enslaved at least a million computers and is available to rent for cybercriminals.

Cisco Talos said its own research overlaps with some of IBM's findings. The spammers appear to be using a whole variety of different email scam formats, some of which include actual passwords or phone numbers, whereas others simply claim to have filmed the victim masturbating or cheating on their spouse.

On Wednesday, security provider Barracuda Networks also published a blog post, warning about the porn scam, which it said was ongoing. "One woman we spoke to has received a variant of the sextortion scam email three times since the beginning of October. Each email she received came about a week apart, and the threats changed each time," the company said.

To avoid falling for these schemes, security researchers recommend you ignore any emails from senders you don't know. Educating yourself on the latest email-based scams is a good idea, too.

"Doing web searches for key phrases in suspect emails may help to verify that a scam is taking place or at least increase awareness of the attack," Barracuda Networks said. "Always pay close attention to the details and do not assume that a breached password or spoofed email means that you are currently compromised. Ask your ISP or tech support for help if you have questions."