Stay Secure- Extortion Scams (Part 2)

Welcome back! Just as family day weekend is starting, we're going to cover a couple other examples of extortion scams that exist online. If you'd like to read more, check out part 1!

Denial of Service Attack: In this form of scam, scammers will flood a company's/user's website with requests, effectively shutting out visitors from the website. Once a website is down, the scammers demand payment from the company in order to cease their attack. In cases of DoS attacks, the best response is calling the police. Paying the price the scammers claim does not guarantee resumption of services.

Bomb Threat: Similarly to the hostage scam, the scammer will claim to have hidden a bomb in the building of a residence/company, and request payment through wire transfer or cryptocurrency address in exchange for the defusal of the bomb. These threats are most often unsubstantiated, but the best way to solve the situation would be to not reply to any email and report the threat to local police immediately, regardless of what the email claims.

Stay Safe. Stay Secure.