For Ransom, Bitcoin Replaces the Bag of Bills

I know this is not 100% specific to this article, but this is happening right now to a friend of mine's gmail account. Scammer was able to social engineer the cell phone company to forward his number, then did a password reset, and locked him out of his account. 20BTC Ransom. He followed every single google customer service link/resource he could find and tried to reset link, which said they would contact him in 3-5 days. This was 6 days ago. No response. FBI can't do anything either. Its so disturbing that there is absolute nothing you can do to reach Google once this happens. It could happen on anyone's cell phone as well, how many fortune 500 companies have higher up employees with cell phones and gmail accounts? Imagine in the future trusting google with a self driving car and home automation -- imagine getting locked out of your house or hijacked in a self driving car and having nobody to call. If anybody here knows somebody at google who can reach the group that handles Gmail security, please contact this account so I can give you his info.

So if a) users don&#x27;t get smarter about security and b) the use of Bitcoin as a ransom currency doesn&#x27;t get disincentivized, how will this play out? I can&#x27;t see the status quo continuing; resigning to &quot;oh well, the nerds have won, we can&#x27;t do anything&quot; isn&#x27;t how the government tends to operate.<p>Would the government try to really hammer down on Bitcoin if this becomes the epidemic I think that it might?<p>Government regulation of companies that permit easily &quot;hacked&quot; accounts?<p>The introduction of personal insurance policies for online data that would pay?

Why can&#x27;t you track where they spend the ransom money via the blockchain? Couldn&#x27;t this be used to identify the criminals?

To me this is a serious downside of cryptocurrencies - the fact that criminals have this secure channel of stealing from victims.<p>Besides malware, one can be blackmailed with information disclosure (everyone has secrets), one can be physically bullied into transferring his BTC or forced to pay bribes by police or corrupt authorities. In western countries some of these may seem impossible, but in a lot of places, police or authorities are worse than criminals. And of course good old hacking.<p>It&#x27;s also a very good incentive for maybe-criminals to actually go and do the crime - because the risks of being caught are very small.<p>One counter argument is that it&#x27;s possible to steal cash anonymously too, but of course it&#x27;s not the same thing, just like crypto is not cash.<p>This is serious problem with (anonymous) crypto and it will only grow bigger and bigger as it goes more mainstream..

It&#x27;s hard to take these seriously when they equate digital ransom with actual kidnapping. Clickbait headline if I ever saw one.