Bomb Threats In Japan Start With Bitcoin Ransom Demands

Bomb threats in Japan stared as an unknown individual threatened 18 Japanese prefectures to bomb them unless BTC Ransom is paid so let’s read more in our latest Bitcoin news.

An unknown person has threatened to place bombs in the schools and churches of about 18 Japanese prefectures unless a Bitcoin ransom is paid out. According to a local news outlet Japan Today, the emails started back in July and continued ever since with the attackers still at large despite the police efforts. One such instance saw the emails threats demanded 40 BTC which are valued at over $450,000 to the town of Yamagata in Northern Japan while on the Japanese island of Miyakojima, the bomb threats were sent to schools and high schools as well as city halls.

These targets show a pattern and the reported emails went out to smaller Japanese towns and rural areas like Tara, Minami, and Sanjo ahead of bigger cities like Osaka and Tokyo. This has led authorities to question the motives of the sender that of the criminals trying to extort BTC from municipal facilities in rural Japan where the cryptocurrencies are unlikely to be widely used or even known:

 “Asahi City Hall was also threatened for Bitcoin, but they don’t have any Bitcoin in the first place.”

So far, there was no actual bombing taken place but the emails keep on coming. Speaking of Japan, In collaboration with a group of seven central banks, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published its first joint report into central bank digital currencies on October 9, and with that started focusing on the foundational principles and core features of CBDCs.

Along with the report, the Bank of Japan released a document that outlines its own specific approach to CBDCs from a Japan-based perspective. The report shows that the Bank of Japan will start the new project with the first of several testing phases for its own CBDC sometime in 2021. This will include the development of a test environment for the currency and experiments on the basement functions as a payment instrument.

In the other crypto regulation news, we can see that Japan is prone to a wide range of natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, cyclones, and volcanic eruptions) which is why resilience should be a core feature.