Hacker Holds Mysterious Bitcoin Inventor’s Identity for Ransom

A person going by the name “Jeffrey” has usurped an email account belonging to the virtual currency’s secretive founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, saying he will sell Nakamoto’s secrets for money.

Jeffrey also claims to have information on Nakamoto that could be used to reveal the bitcoin creator's true identity.

In a Pastebin post, Jeffrey said he will release Satoshi’s secrets if someone pays 25 bitcoins (currently about $12,000). He says he has email messages dating back to 2011.

Jeffrey would not say how he took over Nakamoto’s account, but it appears he leveraged the gmx.com address to take over other Nakamoto accounts. One was used Monday to post a message to the P2P Foundation website. Another to deface an old bitcoin developer page on the Sourceforge open-source coding site.

Michael Marquardt, head administrator of the Bitcointalk.org discussion forum, says that Jeffrey sent him an excerpt of an email he’d sent to Nakamoto in March of this year. “So either the email account was compromised since March,” he says, “or the attacker gained access to old emails when he compromised the account.”

“I’m pretty sure,” Marquardt says, “that this is just some troll in it for the laughs.”

In Jeffrey’s P2P Foundation message, he claimed that information about Nakamoto was already floating around online.

“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,” he wrote.

Nakamoto has kept a low profile since 2010. “So it’s possible that after a few years of disuse, the webmail provider that runs Nakamoto’s account, GMX.com, simply allowed somebody new to register the satoshin@gmail.com address,” Wired reports.