Early Bitcoin Adopters Facing Extortion Threats

An anonymous reader writes Wired recounts the story of Hal Finney, one of the very first adopters of Bitcoin. Finney died earlier this year after a long fight with Lou Gehrig's disease. But for months before his death, he was a victim of constant harassment from somebody trying to extort his Bitcoins. He and his family faced a variety of threats, and had a SWAT team called on their residence. And it turns out Finney is not alone — other early adopters are being targeted with similar threats. "That's when someone using the names Nitrous and Savaged hacked into [early adopter Roger Ver's] email accounts and demanded that he cough up 37 bitcoins—about $20,000 at the time—in order to prevent his private information from being published online. Ver refused, and the hacker apparently backed off after Ver put a 37 bitcoin bounty on his head. Ver, who was himself sentenced to 10 months in federal prison for illegally shipping explosive across state lines, believes that Savaged is not only the same person who swatted Hal Finney, but also the person who gained access to Satoshi Nakamoto's email account earlier this year."

Comments

Still can't believe

[Kobun]

That swatting is a thing. How can it be that a single, anonymous phone call is all it takes to deploy a militarized police team to your front door? It blows my mind. That it keeps happening over and over ... ugh.

Re:Still can't believe

[Cigarra]

Because police departments have all this budget and military gear and they're itching to use it?

Re:Still can't believe

[Translation Error]

Because if someone calls in and they don't break your house and kill your dogs, someone will sue them?

Suing the police for not responding to actual violent crimes has been tried. The courts ruled that the police have no obligation.

Re:Still can't believe

[TheCarp]

That assumes they even are "departments". Here in MA swat teams are private companies, which seems to have gone unnoticed until someone tried to file FOIA requests for information about how often they are deployed; and they refused to answer.

Because of course, knowing how often and why they are deployed is only reporting to the public on exactly what we pay them for, its not something the public has any right to know or anything.

Re:Still can't believe

[ultranova]

when you give people the simplified choice of, should this tragedy have happened, or do we prevent it in the future, they will always pick the "lets prevent this in the future option". Because they are not writing the budges, they are not directly taking money out of schools or medical care. They are not deciding exactly what rights to trampled on.

Yes, it's the dumb public who's at fault. Except... for some strange reason the police don't behave this way in, say, Nordic countries, despite them being openly and officially huge-government welfare nanny states straight from Ayn Rand's worst nightmares. So perhaps, just perhaps, the problem behind the police acting like an occupying force is not the public but the police themselves?

Fireworks

[Orgasmatron]

http://dailyanarchist.com/2012...

http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Newsroo...

He was charged for selling agricultural fireworks (to scare away pests) on ebay. Turns out that the manufacturer was making them too powerful and/or not following regulations that limit their sale to farmers, ranchers, and growers.

He was also the only person prosecuted over the incident, despite the same fireworks being sold all over, including Cabelas. (Ken Shearer is mentioned in the CPSC press release, but his case is unrelated.)

Take a pack of Black Cats camping

[raymorris]

If you go camping and take a pack of Black Cats with you, you may have just illegally transported explosives. Details matter.

Re:Told you so

[sanvila]

Euro, is very spendable, mostly stable.

Then you've never watched it's 25%+ fluctuations up and down over the last 10 years.

You can't measure the stability of a currency just by comparing it to your own currency. If we followed that line of reasoning, the only stable currency to you would be one which is pegged to the US Dollar. The price of one Euro fluctuates if you measure it in Dollars, yes, but that does not speak against the stability of the Euro more than it does against the stability of the Dollar.