I was shocked by an email that was blackmailing me to pay up in Bitcoin; otherwise sensitive information would be released to the world. I receive spam just like everyone else, but what made this especially disconcerting was having my name and an old password in the subject line. Whoever this person was, had the sophistication to access real data.

Here’s my serious email tech advice. If this ever happens to you, immediately change and fortify all of your passwords and report the spam to the authorities. Who to email it to? Do a search for “report spam” and choose the organization that best fits you. This might also help:

Abuse and Spam Reporting
To report unlawful, abusive, unwanted or malicious email that you find originating from an Outlook.com, Hotmail, Live, or MSN account , please forward a complete copy of the abusive message (including the full message header) to

ab***@ou*****.com











. Sending these types of communications is a violation of Microsoft policy and appropriate action will be taken on confirmed reports. 

After some research I discovered that there had been similar complaints from other people who were hit by the same scam. Even if the threat is real (most of them really aren’t), the FBI website advises anyone who has been blackmailed to never pay the ransom … they discourage even a reply to the message because doing so would only confirm that your email address is legit and that could lead to more extortion. Think about it, what will prevent the crooks from asking more? They lack compassion.

Other steps

If you know how to blacklist emails, do so with that specific email. If you know how to blacklist an IP address, block that as well. You want to make sure that the crook(s) have no way of communicating with you. Think about it. How can they threaten you if they can’t get hold of you?

There’s a lot of cyber crime going on. We hear about it often but somehow it really only hits home when it gets personal.

Of course if you do Facebook, have a Gmail account, or search using Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. then you’re already screwed. They already know everything about you.

Please be careful.