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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

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skrebbel·

> why should clients pay up

Because otherwise their ad income stops.

How does "I might get extorted again by someone else" factor into this?

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> How does "I might get extorted again by someone else" factor into this?

The value of the ad income may be more than paying the extortion when it happens once. That doesn't mean it's more when it happens more than once.

And what prevents them from asking again next week. Or forging account ban regardless of ransom.

You still probably get the best outcomes if you're willing to pay sufficiently credible threats a couple times.

We don't typically see that with ransomeware so I don't know why we'd see that with other types of extortion.

With ransomware if you get hacked you usually fix your defenses.

Or a different extortionist comes along next week?

The whole scheme would collapse. It only works as long as people reasonably believe paying will solve the problem for a long while. This is why many ransomware campaigns pretty much run a callcentre with support for how to easily buy BTC and make the transfer.

If there’s only one group running the scheme it works, but if there are many, it becomes very difficult to coordinate and limit repeated demands. Soft of like how oil producers can only keep the price up if everyone joins the cartel. Each member will make more money if they defect.

This is why organized crime is very aggressive toward upstarts.

So these scammers have a better customer support system than Google?

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