A hacker has appeared to have gained access to Satoshi Nakamoto’s email account, and is now threatening to sell the elusive Bitcoin creator’s personal information to anyone with 25BTC — or around $12,000 — to spare.
The hacker took to anonymous posting site Pastebin to lay out the terms of their shady offer, the Guardian reports.
In a Sept. 8 post titled “Satoshi’s Dox For Sale,” the hacker writes, “Releasing the so called ‘gods’ dox if my address hits 25 BTC. And no, this is not a scam, you can see the below screenshots for proof of inbox ownership and a little teaser.” The hacker then provides screenshots they claim depict Mr. Nakamoto’s GMX email inbox.
Things got even eerier yesterday when the supposed hacker directly addressed Mr. Nakamoto by commenting on the 2009 Ning post announcing Bitcoin’s existence. The hacker posted their message using Mr. Nakamoto’s username:
Dear Satoshi. Your dox, passwords and IP addresses are being sold on the darknet. Apparently you didn’t configure Tor properly and your IP leaked when you used your email account sometime in 2010. You are not safe. You need to get out of where you are as soon as possible before these people harm you. Thank you for inventing Bitcoin.
Hey, at least they were polite about it?
But perhaps the real Mr. Nakamoto doesn’t have to worry — as of yesterday, the hacker’s Bitcoin address had only received 1.5BTC. Maybe people don’t want to continue bugging Mr. Nakamoto, whomever he may be, about his identity. Or maybe people are already convinced that Mr. Nakamoto is actually blogger and former law school professor Nick Szabo, as linguistics studies have indicated.
Additionally, messages sent to Mr. Nakamoto’s email address are reportedly being bounced back, leading the Guardian to theorize that Mr. Nakamoto or a third party found a way to shut down the account.
