Bitcoin Extortionist Swatting Cryptographers
When Satoshi Nakamoto, a name widely believed to be a pseudonym for a small group, published the specifications for Bitcoin back in 2008 the effort was not widely recognized at first. One of those who did understand the implications was cryptographer Hal Finney. His early entry into mining Bitcoin provided him with the funds he and his wife Fran needed for his five-year battle with Lou Gehrig's disease. This financial success was not without its hassles, and the worst was the Bitcoin Extortionist. When two months of menacing calls to the Finney home failed to produce the desired results,....
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It appears that an extortionist is aiming to make life hard for certain bitcoin adopters. It has been reported that during the final stages of his battle with ALS, early bitcoin enthusiast Hal Finney spent a long and arduous 30 minutes shivering on his front lawn while a SWAT team cleared his home. It was the work of an alleged bitcoin extortionist, who after several failed attempts to extract $400,000 in bitcoin from Finney, finally used phone number spoofing technology to place a call to authorities from Finney's home number and make the following claim... That he had killed two people....
The Charity Commission in the United Kingdom has issued an alert toward all charities about an extortionist group demanding between £300 – £500 in bitcoin (approx. 1.03 to 1.72 BTC) or face cyberattacks, if the ransom isn’t paid up. In an alert issued toward UK-based charities today, the Charity Commission has revealed that a cyber-extortion group calling themselves the “RepKiller Team” are threatening businesses around the UK with their extortionist demands. The group is unlike other cyber-criminal extortionist groups who normally operate with distributed denial of service (DDoS)....
A 56-year old man from the city of Napier in New Zealand has plead guilty to multiple charges of blackmail following his attempts to extort several major companies in the country with bitcoin. Gregory David O’Neill was sentenced to five years and seven months in prison by the Napier District Court yesterday after previously pleading guilty to eight charges of blackmail, reports the NZHerald. O’Neill sent letters to several unidentified major companies in New Zealand, purporting to be a group that would carry out threats against these companies unless a bitcoin ransom was paid. The reported....
Privacy protocols have become the focal point of regulators and law enforcement agencies when the race among central banks to launch sovereign digital currencies is heating up.
“Police are inevitably corrupted.” A quote from Frank Herbert’s novel God Emperor of Dune may hold true in the case of a group of cops in Thailand who allegedly prey on foreign nationals to extort money. A Chinese-Vanuatu expat who filed a complaint at Thailand’s law enforcement agency said that the extortionist cops coerced him […]