Scam email claims you’ll die unless you pay up

Email scams come in all shapes and sizes.

Sometimes they’ll try and trick you into opening up a malicious attachment disguised as an innocent delivery invoice. Others will tell you you’ve won the Internet lottery, but just as soon as you pay the obligatory security costs.

Or, like this one, they’ll threaten to assassinate you unless you pay a ransom.

Thankfully, that latter one is quite rare. That’s likely down to its utter absurdity and as such it’s [hopefully] very low success rate. But as some email recipients have recently reported, it’s still occasionally doing the rounds. For example, the below email, titled “Please read this it can be the most important information in your life.”

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If that overly dramatic email subject caught your attention, then you’re in for a bit of a shock when you read what lies within the email.

Hello
I advise you to take this message seriously, if you value your life, since this is not a joke or a scam. I’ve been thinking for a long time whether it’s worth sending this message to you and decided that after all you still have the right to know. I’ll try to be short. I received an order to kill you, because your activity causes trouble to a particular person. I studied you for quite a time and made a decision to give you a chance, despite the specifics of my job, the business rules of which do not allow me to do this, as this will kill my reputation (more 12 years of perfect order executions)in certain circles. But i decided to break a rule since this is my last order (at least I do hope so).
In general, let’s Break it down. I want you to pay the amount of 0.5 Btc. I accept btc. Information how to forward you can find in Google. Here are my payment details:
[[ BitCoin wallet code retracted ]]
When i will receive funds I’ll send you the name of the man order came from, as well as all the evidence i have. You will be able to use them with the police. I would not suggest you to call the police, because you have a little time (2 days) and the police simply will not have time to investigate.

Answering to this letter does not make sense, i use one-time mailbox, cause i really do care about my anonymity. I’ll contact you as soon as i’ll getfunds.

I really regret that you became my prey.

If you’re wondering what the ransom is in real world terms, 0.5 Bitcoins are around $8,500USD (£6,300) So in this case, the scammer really is rather optimistic.

Okay, let’s face it, nearly everyone who gets that email isn’t going to pay up. The more seasoned cyber surfer recipients will laugh it off as a scam, and the odd person who does take it seriously is more likely to speak to more knowledgeable friends first, or ignore the advice in the email and head straight to the police instead.

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But when the payoff is so large, scammers only need that 1 or 2 recipients from a bag of millions of potential victims to fall for it. History has taught us that those who do fall for the more outrageous of email scams tend to be elderly, isolated and vulnerable email recipients.

So if you know someone who could be caught unaware by the audacity of this brand of email extortion, give them a heads up.

You never know, it could save them a lot of money.