Beware! Extortion Artists Are Scamming Website Owners

Owning and managing a website is not an easy job for anyone to do, but things can get even more complicated when you realize that there are a lot of extortion artists out there that will be trying to one up you and extort a certain amount of money from you. One example of such an attempt at extortion happened recently, when the owner of a website received an email threatening that he would have to deal with an avalanche of negative feedback due to the actions of an extortion artist if he did not send 0.3 bitcoins which roughly amounts to $2500.

The reputation of a website is inevitably crucial to its owner, so the owner of this website was clearly alarmed at what appeared to be an attempt at blackmail. This is a little different from previous extortion attempts that the internet has seen however which claim that they will leak videos recorded of people visiting adult sites and the like since it targets websites directly and gives the website owner an incentive to take what they are saying very seriously indeed.

The chilling email gives details about how the extortion artists will go about defaming the website as well, so it’s clear that a lot of thought has been put into this. More work will have to be done in the field of securing websites and preventing these kinds of scam from occurring on a regular basis. The owner of the site that is being blackmailed right now might not have anything to worry about though as this may very well be a prank that someone is playing on him.



Hat tip: Malekal's site / Bleepingcomputer.

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