So, I will be very generic here to protect the innocent, but I and some of you woke up yesterday morning to an email threatening to blackmail and blacklist anyone who did not immediately pay 500 bucks via green dot money pak.
The email at first glance appeared to come from a very reputable and very cool provider who sometimes visits the northeast.
It was clearly NOT her, due to tone, syntax and style.
I let her know and she was of course shocked. We determined the origin of the scammer and it is someone who tried something similar a few months back.

I am posting this to reassure any other recipients that this is a total scam and that the very cool provider is not behind this, and that the scammer in question is known and not capable of following through on anything meaningful . Do not respond to these emails- they are designed to extort and panic hobbyists and hurt the rep of a totally upstanding woman.
Take care all.

A similar situation happened in November with a well-reputed provider who had recently retired. Email was supposedly from her husband, and demanded a sum of money or everyone's info would be outed on some website somewhere. Apparently, the provider had been beaten up and that caused the whole thing.

Now, no info went out and, if i recall my own research correctly, a few of her super-regulars had gotten in touch with her and she said the whole thing was complete horseshit.

Unless I had more cash than I knew what to do with, or was a public figure of some sort, I can't imagine sending money to something like this.

Ladys of TER and the Agencys as well did NOT keep any personal information after verification.

There have been MANY disucssions about personal information, verification, etc. If what we Hobbyists are being told is true, how can anyone get the needed information to extort anyone.

I am saying this SOMEWHAT sarcastically.

Tony

These sent out spam to everyone on their "contact list".  

Best thing to do is not keep a "contact list" in your hobby e-mail.  This is a digression from the original post, and far less serious.  Was able to simply delete the spam.  

Don't open links that seem suspicious.

Ladies, if you are listening... strong passwords! The longer the better, no English words or words from other languages that could be guessed from the ethnic identity in your profile. Use a mix of upper and lower case, numbers, and very importantly... special characters. There are two types of attacks hackers use against passwords, dictionary attacks, and brute force attacks. Dictionary attacks just use tables of often used phrases in English or other relevant languiges, brute force attacks just use randomly generated strings of alpha-numeric or alpha-numeric and special character sequences. The link below explains "haystacks" and has a lot of basic information about password strength. As a rule of thumb, any password you can easily remember is a weak password. Steve Gibson's haystacks are the exception to that rule. Steve also has an extremely powerful random password generator on his site.

Steve's "haystack" page uses ssl (secure socket layer). TER does not allow a secure socket layer link (https), so I posted a http link... I think it will still work.