Give us money, or we’ll expose you for what you are – email extortion

Give us money, or we’ll expose you for what you are.

That is the gist of the flurry of extortion emails hitting cyberspace this week that attempt to extort exposed members of the Ashley Madison website.

We spoke about the emails briefly during our “5 worrying consequences of the Ashley Madison hack” article.

For those not in the know, and we can’t imagine that would be many by now, Ashley Madison is a website that is designed for cheating partners to have affairs. But a hacking incident has led to its member base being leaked online for all to see.

And that has caused many problems for both the members and the website itself.

And now those who have had their information leaked online have reported getting emails that tell them they need to send BTC1.00000001 (that’s 1 hundred-millionth of a bitcoin, or roughtly $200) or they will expose your information to your family, loved ones, even where you work.

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The scammers are apparently relying on the fact that the member’s family etc. were unaware that the member has been implicated in the Ashley Madison hack and was hoping they would not find out.

The scammers even threaten to expose the members Facebook profile, identifying it as a Ashley Madison member.

It is also worth noting that if you received an email attempting to extort money from you, but were not a member of the website, this doesn’t mean that someone on the site was using your email or details. Reports have also surfaced that the extortion emails have been sent en mass to a large database of emails in the hope that a percentage of them land in the inboxes belonging to members.

Should you pay?

We’ll give you the same advice we gave victims of the CyberLocker ransomware that was popular in 2013 that encrypted user data and held it to a ransom also to be paid via Bitcoin… no, it’s probably not a good idea. You’re dealing with criminals, so there is no guarantee that the criminals would keep their word, nor is there any guarantee they even have your details in the first place or will go through with it (not that we can ourselves can guarantee that!)

But of course it is ultimately up to each person. In doing so you may prevent criminals from exposing your information, but it is a huge risk that will ultimately strengthen the motivation for criminals to engage in this type of extortion in the future.

Our hot topic on the forums this week – if you were a member of the Ashley Madison website and got an email attempting to extort you for money, what would you do?