Ashley Madison customers are now receiving e-mails demanding a specific amount of money or bitcoins in exchange for not having their information exposed. However is this really going to prevent customers from having their information exposed for their family and friends to see?

“In the wake of the recent Ashley Madison e-mail dump, some customers have gotten demand e-mails,” according Arstechnica.

The e-mails are demanding a specific amount of money; 1.05 bitcoins which is approximately $243 according to the report. The amount is pretty exact and researchers began thinking there could be something a bit off about these e-mails.

“As Toshiro Nishimura, a security researcher with Cloudmark, concluded in a blog post earlier this week, ‘this extortion campaign could have yielded a worthwhile sum for very little effort.,'” according to the report. 

“All the blackmailer (who calls him or herself ‘Barton’) had to do was download the Ashley Madison data, extract the email addresses, generate a Bitcoin address for each victim, send out the e-mails, and Bob’s your uncle.”

It’s a fairly simple process and from the sounds of it, it’s pretty illegal as well. Nishimura dug a little deeper to find out more information about the extortionists.

“Specifically, we found 67 suspicious transactions totalling 70.35 BTC or approximately 15814 USD within the extortion time frame of approximately 4 days paying 1.05 BTC to addresses, with no previous activity, and with 2 or fewer transaction outputs,” according to the Arstechnica report.

“All suspicious address we found are attached below. (We conservatively restricted ourselves to ordinary transactions with 2 or less outputs, thus excluding those which were less likely to be simple one-to-one payments.)”

“In other words, because there were approximately 40 percent more Bitcoin transactions that fulfilled those criteria, they concluded that those are likely ones that paid the 1.05 bitcoins, for a total of about $6,400.”

Even further, this money does not guarantee you a free pass from being exposed.

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