PSA: Don’t Kill Yourself, Literally, Over BS Ransomware
26th March 2014
We’ve talked about ransomware in the past, the process by which criminals pose as either rights holders or law enforcement to convince people that they must pay large sums of money for transgressions in order to avoid serious jail time.
The ugliest face of this particular problem isn’t even addressed in the article, which is: Would these threats have any effect if it weren’t for the fact that people are aware of what sort of Orwellian power that the current morass of government law/regulation affords those who know how to work the system? We even have a word for it — ‘lawfare’. We increasingly live in a world where one can impose financially crippling costs on someone merely by taking them to court, especially if one is a public official (ponder how ‘plea bargains’ work) or a business enterprise with deeper pockets than most ordinary individuals possess. News reports are full of instances where some poor guys gets a letter from a lawyer (or sounding as if it came from a lawyer) indulging in what is fairly obvious extortion.