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A comment on Hotel ransomed by hackers as guests locked in rooms. Parent comment

Re:Hotel ransomed by hackers as guests locked in rooms by tom_mellior on Sunday January 29, 2017 @04:33AM (#13513315)
> They only wanted 1,500 EUR? That seems like an awfully low number for something this serious.

Besides the argument of picking a sum that makes it relatively easy for a business to cough up, this is 1500 EUR tax-free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_... lists average net monthly income in Austria as 2000 EUR; pull something like this off twice a month and you're doing fine.

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Re:Hotel ransomed by hackers as guests locked in rooms by mseebach on Sunday January 29, 2017 @07:23AM (#13513811)
It's not "tax free", it's illegal income to which tax is a pretty orthogonal concern. You have to consider a fairly high discount on any non-trivial illegal income, as there are many things you can't do with it without laundering them first (which is very expensive to do at scale).
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