I would simply add the word bitcoin to my spam filter and move on. There's no reason not to, unless you're actively involved in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and most people aren't.

These scams must work, or they wouldn't continue happening. The cost to send them is probably quite low, such that one in one thousand people being willing and able to send money is sufficient.

But it's hard for me to imagine. What's the Venn diagram of overlap between people who a) would think this is real, b) would be able to figure out how to pay the scammer, and c) care enough about this sort of thing being exposed that they'd be willing to do so?

I also think, in this day and age, there are better things to accuse people of to get them to pay out. But then I am probably not in the target demo for the scam.

> They all include blockchain identifiers. I've looked up the blockchain addresses; none of them have ever received payments. This is an ineffective scam.

How do you know they don’t make a new address for each message or maybe for every x messages?

It seems to me that extortion is incredibly difficult to prevent. I imagine most people have weak spots that are potentially exploitable with only a few weeks of effort.

So I have to wonder why it isn’t more common, and why spam emails and spam callers are still widely used when it clearly has greater exposure risk.

Is it that the punishment for spam is more relaxed than the punishment for targeted extortion? Or maybe targeted extortion would reveal more about the criminal? Perhaps spam emails, while highly exposed, do offer some level of anonymity that is greater than extortion. Or perhaps the thieves prefer to live stable lives and extorting people in a specific area would make them a greater target.

Just trying to figure out why spam emails is still a thing.

I thought about this as if I was starting my own scam-ring. Targeting individuals by cornering them into desperate situations may be more lucrative, but, in a matter of time, will lead to very real threats made against you. Spamming random email addresses fishing for the weakest seems like a better long-term play. Though it would be wise to never underestimate who you are targeting, simpler minded targets will always be easier.

I’m not sure about that. Think about what would be so bad in your life that you’d send somebody huge money to avoid exposure of it. Keeping in mind they’ll demand more money later because you’ll be tagged as an easy mark.

TBF as the author has pointed out, this particular scam doesn't seem to work at all - he has received multiple different bitcoin addresses to send money to over the years and none of them have ever received any money. So extortion might be difficult to prevent, but this one seems to be relatively benign.

It’s also possible the actor is using a unique address per recipient.

You need a very low success rate to make spam pay though. If someone does pay $1,200 it covers a lot of emails sent.

Certainly true, but the fact that sending spam is cheap doesn't buy the scammers groceries. If they don't squeeze a steady trickle of money out of victims it seems like it would be hard for them to continue.

This email in particular is extremely prevalent. Always with spaces breaking up the text in different spots as a rudimentary filter bypass measure.

It has been running in this form with only the most minor of changes to the text for years. There have been times when emails I monitor have gotten 10+ of this message in a single day.

I sincerely doubt both the existence of these "hidden messages" and the ulterior motives ascribed to the later spam extortion email. The author is trying to be too clever, to the point of delusion.

There are plenty of places where scam cultures exist, where spam email formats (they used to be called modalities) are passed around between participants, many of which are newbies trying to score big, often still minors. They may have seen or heard of one or two people around them hitting big with a scam and that's all the motivation they need to send out a hundred more messages. Spammers are not always some super-smart entity, they can be clueless teens cargo-culting their way into your inbox too.

Covert messages in spam? What will we think of next?

on the plus side, it bought us together :3

I keep getting spam to [email protected] (which I used for a dodgy signup wondering if spammers would react differently to a vaguely official looking address) claiming to try to sell me electric bicycles. I don't really understand why someone would ever want to buy nore than one or two electric bicycles or why they'd buy them from a spammer. The message is written in a way that could look like it was merely misdirected. This sounds like a message used to test mail servers etc as mentioned in the article.

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Entirely separate comment: this type of broadcast channel is used in the newsgroup alt.anonymous.messages, though in there, the presence of a message is obvious.