Email:  Subject Line: [My favorite password]

Holy fucking shit, I’ve been hacked.

Said they had access to my computer for the past 123 days. Said they controlled my camera, turned it on and had video of me watching porn. “You are a sick man,” they said.

Have I been to a porn site in the last 123 days?  Fuck.

Send them $2,000 in bitcoin or they send the video to 3 “random” contacts on my list.

Stole the image from a related story here.

Hmmmmm…  Go ahead.

Everybody I know would delete that shit in 3 seconds.  Only the pendejos would hold it against me. But they would just berate me in text and email.  Everybody else would never mention it again.

The Bear wouldn’t even bother to look.  She’s seen that shit before.

Two days later, got a security email from the giant University that signs my checks — it was just Phishing.  Report if you want to, but they had thousands of reports.  Delete and ignore.

That part is easy. Forgetting the feeling that some stranger on the internet has you by the balls sticks with you.

For years, I thought B-movie extortion plots were fucking stupid.  Just call the cops, or ignore it. Not that hard.

But suddenly, I just want to kill these sons-a-bitches…  Better to spend a life in jail than live like this.  But not with a gun.  Guns are too good for them.  I need to kill them face-to-face with a rusty knife. If they don’t bleed out, the tetanus will get them.

It wasn’t about the non-existent money that I didn’t give them.

It wasn’t about the shame or humiliation. Shame is just the start.

It was about control.  Suddenly somebody “had something on me”. That somebody must die.

Murderous feeling faded after a few hours.

After a few days, I had to take notes just to remember enough about it to type out this bullshit.  See, one advantage to old age.

My memory is not good enough to hold a grudge.  20 years ago, I would have dreamed about tracking them down — developing my “very particular skills” — and exacting my revenge. Now it’s just delete, empty trash and type out a little bullshit rant.

Less satisfying, but a little smarter than murder.

One little email isn’t really extortion.  It’s more like some little “X-game” to see who is dumb enough to put their bitcoins in the internet equivalent of a bus station locker. It’s the first intelligence test, I have passed in a while.