New Zealand Bitcoin Extortionist Jailed for Blackmail
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....
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Extortion for Bitcoin has become more and more common within the United States, with families, businesses and even police departments under attack. Anywhere from a couple of bitcoins to one hundred or more are demanded. The problem has been domestic, but now other major Bitcoin markets like Australia and New Zealand are feeling the effects of those desperate enough for Bitcoin that they turn to a life of crime. A scourge of DOS attacks has hit the region, according to ZDNet. Extortion in Australia by an Unknown Group. The identity of the group or its participants is unknown at this time,....
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)....
Visitors and patrons of Switzerland’s largest strip club have received blackmail letters from self-anointed ‘moralists’, demanding $2,000 in bitcoin (approx 4.72 BTC) or face ‘exposure’ with pictures of them visiting the strip club sent to their families. Bitcoin ransoms aren’t going away anytime soon. Patrons of a Swiss strip club near Zurich have been sent letters that threaten to expose them unless they pay a ransom of $2,000 in bitcoin. A copy of the letter was obtained by Swiss TV channel Tele Zueri and reported by NBC News. The extortionist threat from the letters read: We are....
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,....