I received a blackmail letter in the postal mail yesterday. Yes, really. It begins thusly:
Hello Denton, I’m going to cut to the chase. My name is SwiftBreak~15 and I know about the secret you are keeping from your wife and everyone else. More importantly, I have evidence of what you have been hiding. I won’t go into the specifics here in case your wife intercepts this, but you know what I am talking about.
You don’t know me personally and nobody hired me to look into you. Nor did I go out looking to burn you. It is just your bad luck that I stumbled across your misadventures while working on a job around <redacted name of town>. I then put in more time than I probably should have looking into your life. Frankly, I am ready to forget all about you and let you get on with your life. And I am going to give you two options that will accomplish that very thing. Those two options are to either ignore this letter, or simply pay me $8,600. Let’s examine those two options in more detail.
In email this wouldn't be notable. I probably wouldn't even see it as it would be classified as spam. Via postal mail though, it is unusual. Postal spam is usually less interesting than this.
The letter went on to describe the consequences should I ignore it, how going to the police would be useless because the extortionist was so very good at covering their tracks, and gave a bitcoin address to send the payment to.
There are several clues that this was an automated mass mailing:
- It helpfully included a How To Bitcoin page, which seemed odd for an individual letter (though crucial to make the scam work).
- It looked like a form letter, inserting my first name and street name at several points.
- Perhaps most importantly, I don't have any kind of secret which I could be blackmailed over. I don't live that kind of life. Reading the first paragraph was fairly mystifying as I had no idea what secret they were referring to.
I haven't written about bitcoin before as, other than wishing I'd mined a bunch of coins in 2013 or so, I find it farcical. However cryptocurrency is key in enabling things like this automated blackmail at scale, by providing a mostly anonymous way to transfer money online.
I am by no means the first person to be targeted by this scam:
- Dave Eargle received an early version of the letter, which called out infidelity specifically. The letter I received was completely vague as to the nature of the scandalous secret.
- Joshua Bernoff received a letter earlier this month which looks very similar to mine.
- As the scam has grown, various news outlets have covered it: CNBC, Krebs On Security. The news coverage occurred in a burst in January 2018, covering Dave Eargle.
The amount of money demanded has increased over time. The 2016 letter which Dave Eargle received demanded $2000. The 4/2018 letter which Joshua Bernoff received demanded $8,350. My letter demanded $8,600. I imagine the perpetrator(s) are fine-tuning their demand based on response rates from previous campaigns. More sophisticated demographic targeting is possible I suppose, but the simpler explanation seems more likely.
I'll include the complete text of the letter at the end of this post, to help anyone else targeted by this scam to find it. I'm also trying to figure out if there is somewhere at USPS to send the physical letter to. Using the postal service to deliver extortion letters is a crime, albeit in this case one where it would be difficult to identify the perpetrator.
Hello Denton, I’m going to cut to the chase. My name is SwiftBreak~15 and I know about the secret you are keeping from your wife and everyone else. More importantly, I have evidence of what you have been hiding. I won’t go into the specifics here in case your wife intercepts this, but you know what I am talking about.
You don’t know me personally and nobody hired me to look into you. Nor did I go out looking to burn you. It is just your bad luck that I stumbled across your misadventures while working on a job around <redacted name of town>. I then put in more time than I probably should have looking into your life. Frankly, I am ready to forget all about you and let you get on with your life. And I am going to give you two options that will accomplish that very thing. Those two options are to either ignore this letter, or simply pay me $8,600. Let’s examine those two options in more detail.
Option 1 is to ignore this letter. Let me tell you what will happen if you choose this path. I will take this evidence and send it to your wife. And as insurance against you intercepting it before your wife gets it, I will also send copies to her friends, family, and your neighbors on and around <redacted name of street>. So, Denton, even if you decide to come clean with your wife, it won’t protect her from the humiliation she will feel when her friends and family find out your sordid details from me.
Option 2 is to pay me $8,600. We’ll call this my “confidentiality fee.” Now let me tell you what happens if you choose this path. Your secret remains your secret. You go on with your life as though none of this ever happened. Though you may want to do a better job at keeping your misdeeds secret in the future.
At this point you may be thinking, “I’ll just go to the cops.” Which is why I have taken steps to ensure this letter cannot be traced back to me. So that won’t help, and it won’t stop the evidence from destroying your life. I’m not looking to break your bank. I just want to be compensated for the time I put into investigating you.
Let’s assume you have decided to make all this go away and pay me the confidentiality fee. In keeping with my strategy to not go to jail, we will not meet in person and there will be no physical exchange of cash. You will pay me anonymously using bitcoin. If you want me to keep your secret, then send $8,600 in BITCOIN to the Receiving Bitcoin Address listed below. Payment MUST be received within 10 days of the post marked date on this letter’s envelope. If you are not familiar with bitcoin, attached is a “How-To” guide. You will need the below two pieces of information when referencing the guide.
Required Amount: $8,600
Receiving Bitcoin Address: <redacted>
Tell no one what you will be using the bitcoin for or they may not give it to you. The procedure to obtain bitcoin can take a day or two so do not put it off. Again, payment must be received within 10 days of this letter’s post marked date. If I don’t receive the bitcoin by the deadline, I will go ahead and release the evidence to everyone. If you go that route, then the least you could do is tell your wife so she can come up with an excuse to prepare her friends and family before they find out. The clock is ticking, Denton.