Besides being plain nasty (kidnapping, murder, extortion) this also manages to sound fishy as hell.
It might be a sorting mechanism along the lines of what the Nigerian scammers used to only attract the truly, truly gullible.*
From Decrypt, July 10:
Blockchain intelligence firm Arkham is opening an exchange where data on the identities of crypto wallet owners can be traded and requested.
Arkham Intelligence, a blockchain intelligence company, today announced on Twitter that it's launching “the world’s first on-chain intelligence exchange.”
A thirty-second promo vid informs the viewer that the platform will let users anonymously buy and sell information on the identities of any crypto wallet address through smart contracts.
One central feature of the platform is “intel bounties” where those who need it can offer cash to blockchain-savvy analysts to dox (identify) any crypto wallet owner's name or address.
Arkham says its new platform will bridge the gap between analysts on the one hand and traders, investors, journalists, researchers, and protocols on the other....
....MUCH MORE
False positives cause many promising detection technologies to be unworkable in practice. Attackers, we show, face this problem too. In deciding who to attack true positives are targets successfully attacked, while false positives are those that are attacked but yield nothing.
This allows us to view the attacker’s problem as a binary classification, and use Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) curves to analyze the economics. The most profitable strategy requires accurately distinguishing viable from non-viable users, and balancing the relative costs of true and false positives. We show that as victim density decreases the fraction of viable users than can be profitably attacked drops dramatically. For example, a 10× reduction in density can produce a 1000× reduction in the number of victims found. At very low victim densities the attacker faces a seemingly intractable Catch-22: unless he can distinguish viable from non-viable users with great accuracy the attacker cannot find enough victims to be profitable. However, only by finding large numbers of victims can he learn how to accurately distinguish the two.
Finally, this approach suggests an answer to the question in the title. Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.
