![]() ![]() ![]() Second, the extortionist knows that the scam has a much better chance of working if they can cause the victim to react with emotion rather than logic. Nobody is going to pay up if the threat is inconsequential. Whatever the threat, it has to be something drastic. This can be anything from threatening to expose an affair to threatening to kill a puppy. First, the threat has to carry unacceptable consequences. How extortionists get resultsĮxtortionists know that if they want to get paid, their threat needs to do two things. Before I tell you how the story ends, I want to take a step back and examine why cyber-extortion scams like this one work. So obviously, this was a delicate situation. The extortionist threatened to send the incriminating images to everyone in my friend’s address book unless my friend paid nearly $10,000 in bitcoins. He had been contacted by someone who claimed to have hacked into his computer and captured compromising photos from his webcam, as well as screen captures to go along with the photos. To make a really long story short, someone was trying to extort money from my friend. What I wasn’t expecting was my friend’s answer of “I wish.” Nobody wants to be attacked by ransomware, so I knew that my friend must have fallen into a really bad situation, although I couldn’t guess the half of it. At this point, I put two and two together and asked my friend if he had been hit by a ransomware attack. His first question was something to the effect of whether an attacker could cause data loss. Ignoring my question, my friend began to ask me a series of questions about what a hacker realistically could or could not do to a computer. I answered by saying that yes, I do know about bitcoins, and asked what it was that he needed. In doing so, he tried to play it cool, but the simple fact that he had initially said that he had been trying to reach me for days told me that this was no casual inquiry. My friend then proceeded to ask me if I knew anything about bitcoins. Within minutes of regaining a cell signal, however, I received a phone call from a friend who said that he had been trying to reach me for days. Recently, I was traveling and was off of the grid for a while. Let me give you a rather horrifying example. ![]() The demand is usually for money (commonly in the form of bitcoins), but an extortionist could conceivably demand just about anything. So what is cyber-extortion? Cyber-extortion can come in many different forms, but at its simplest, it is when someone online threatens some sort of harm unless you meet their demands. Right now, one of the online trends that seem to be gaining traction is cyber-extortion. After all, we have all probably been ridiculed by an online troll at one time or another, and who among us hasn’t had someone online try to scam them? As bad as these activities are, however, things can always be worse. In spite of the countless benefits, however, the Internet also has a way of bringing out the very worst in people. Never before has the entire scope of human knowledge been available for the asking. The Internet is probably the most amazing thing ever invented. ![]()
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