A person is demanding over $3.6m worth of Bitcoin from Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange, or they will release 10,000 photo that are similar to the know-your-customer (KYC) data the company uses.
The exchange went public with the blackmail in a blog post on Wednesday August 7. “We are still investigating this case for legitimacy and relevancy,” the statement said. “After refusing to cooperate and continuing with this extortion, this individual has begun distributing the data to the public and to media outlets.”
Binance went on to state that it had discovered inconsistencies between its data and that provided by the blackmailer. “At the present time, no evidence has been supplied that indicates any KYC images have been obtained from Binance, as these images do not contain the digital watermark imprinted by our system,” the statement continued. “With that said, our security team is hard at work pursuing all possible leads in an attempt to identify the source of these images.”
According to the company’s own review, the photos provided seems to be from February 2018, which was around the time Binance had contracted a third-party vendor for KYC verification in order to handle the high volume of requests at that time. The exchange is working closely with the third party to find out more.
Binance then pleaded with the public to help find the blackmailer, offering up to 25 Bitcoin, representing roughly $301,800 for information provided.
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