Bitcoin Scam Case: You Have Been Hacked and Your Secrets Stolen — Pay the Ransom to Get Them Back!

Recently a batch of pure scammers have been running bots to send emails to many websites, telling site owners and bloggers that their personal account data (including email, social accounts, and passwords) has been hacked and stolen, and even claiming that changing the password is useless because they will hack in again!

Then comes the key point: the scammers very kindly remind us that if we want to sleep soundly, we only need to pay US$250 to the BTC Bitcoin wallet address they specify, and they will not sell this popular private data on the darknet.

They even gave a deadline: one day! The transfer must be made within one day, otherwise they will tearfully have to sell the data.

The Scam Email Content About Hacked and Stolen Data Held for Ransom

Below is the English content of the threatening letter sent by the scammers, with a Bitcoin wallet address “17UK4ow9fvWNKxeQMXubKQGbQ8dn7ihciK” attached. I strongly suggest that anyone interested give the transfer a try (don’t worry about being scammed — the author has kindly changed it to my own address).

**

Hello! You’ve been hacked! Now we have all the information about you and your accounts: + all your logins and passwords from all accounts in payment systems, social. networks, e-mail, messengers and other services (cookies from all your browsers, i.e. access without a login and password to any of your accounts) + history of all your correspondence by e-mail, messengers and social. networks + all files from your PC (text, photo, video and audio files) Changing your username and password will not help, we will hack you again. Pay a ransom of $ 250 and you can sleep peacefully without worrying that all information about you and all your accounts, files and personal correspondence will not become public and will not fall into the hands of intruders. Bitcoin wallet to which you want to transfer $ 250 17UK4ow9fvWNKxeQMXubKQGbQ8dn7ihciK** If you do not pay until tomorrow evening, then we will sell all this information on the darknet, there is a huge demand for such information Pay $ 250 and sleep well!

Honestly, as a site administrator, I receive at least a dozen of these extortion emails a day, if not a thousand. If I took every one of them seriously, I would have gone bankrupt long ago and switched to selling bubble tea and fried chicken cutlets.

What made this one interesting enough to record is that this scammer actually played a whole routine.

Please refer to the English text below. This is another scam email I received a day or two later, warning that we had not yet paid the US$250 ransom and that they felt insulted (not really).

These scammers mentioned that they further discovered some valuable content in the stolen data that could sell for at least US$3,000 on the darknet.

This time they were again generous enough to give a chance: as long as the ransom is paid within 7 hours, we can still protect personal data from being used by bad actors such as terrorist organizations.

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Hello! You still have not paid the requested amount of $ 250. We found very interesting in your hacked accounts information that will cost more than $ 3000 on the darknet. We give you one last chance. You have 7 hours to translate the requested a