Hi, your account is infected!
begins the email announcing my downfall. “Modify the pswd right away!” But to what? All the good pswds are taken.
That’s right: ahacker has struck. He has “installed spyware to the adult videos (porno) site and suppose you have spent time on this site to enjoy it…you have got an interesting taste, ha-ha…”
God (and ahacker) knows, I do have interesting taste; I’m constantly performing image searches to help illustrate my various posts, which takes me to all sorts of sites.
ahacker has demanded 1000 USD in bitcoin, “basically a good price for our small riddle.” I have only 2 days to make the payment, or else he’ll “certainly direct your video to all your contacts, such as relatives, colleagues, etcetera.”
The problem is, I have neither bits nor much in the way of coin: it’s all been spent on one vice or another. So later today I plan to confess to my wife. Am expecting floods of tears, followed by more silence than I can bear, then many many words. Finally, acceptance of my basic human male weakness. For better or for worse and all that.
As to my relatives, awkwardness is already part and parcel of the clan. And I suspect many of my colleagues have already fallen into ahacker’s exquisitely spun and impossible-to-escape trap.
Apparently my would-be blackmailer has “built in an unique pixel to this letter” — his demand came in the form of a .jpg — so heknows I’ve read it. What’s more, he “set upa Facebook pixel. Thanks to them. (The stuff thatis usedfor the authorities can helpus.)”
He is so right about that. Fortunately Mr Facebook himself has recently confessed in the Washington Post that the authorities really do need to help save us from him. I mean from ourselves.
Wait a minute. Could ahacker be… Zuck himself? Having a little fun, mastermining yet more money from humanity’s darkest desires?
Whoever ahacker is, I suppose at the end of the day I should really be thanking him. As user John 8:32 said after being exposed in the Ashley Madison hack, the truth will set you free. Now that my browsing activities have been similarly revealed, I feel a vast sense of relief that I no longer have to hide behind incognito mode.
