This was my first extortion scam, but it turned out, it wasn't the first that my company dealt with.

"We have this down to a science," my security team told me proudly.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked. "Why haven't I known about the others?"

"They happened before you came to work here," they explained. But they happened.

Apparently, we've had get-rich-quick schemes, extortion by people claiming to know where users live and to be watching them, and one that targeted parents and claiming that their kids were being watched. All kinds of awful nonsense. "We usually put in the blocks, save the data to CD, call the FBI and send them copies of what we find," they told me. "It's like a fire drill for us now. We know what to do automatically."