If this extortion practice isn't a common curse of Etsy stores with her scale of revenue, I wonder whether it might actually be a competitor (who gets the sales and customers whenever her store is down).

That seems unlikely. The legal risk you put yourself in doing that would be easy higher than any gains you could hope to make.

This is likely some callcenter-adjacent scam. They're probably doing this to hundreds of shops, and occasionally get one cave in and pay.

It happens on Amazon, there was a post on here about it. I’m not sure they’d want to double dip and demand the hush money in that case, but it seems possible it happens on Etsy too.

What legal risk? You're a fly-by-night vendor outside Etsy's jurisdiction who can close up shop and have twelve new corporate entities by tomorrow morning.

It might be too late now, IDK, but perhaps she could lie and tell the attempted extorer that she already pays another extorter and can't afford to pay two extorters at once, and if they keep taking down their store, she'll tell the extorter that she can no longer pay them because of them and do they want another criminal coming after them?

What does she sell on her store?

Laser cut wooden signs. She has a big warehouse in florida with commercial grade laser cutting machines (they started on a Glowforge!)

The products are all custom, e.g. your family's last name laser cut onto wood.

I want one, care to share a link?

Hesitant to link directly to her store here, but she's on this page!

https://www.etsy.com/search?explicit=1&q=last+name+sign&ref=...

Wonder if it is a font license issue.

I’d love some info on how she grew to that size on Etsy. My partner sells some things on Etsy and has had moderate success but nowhere on that level. Did she use Etsy ads, off platform marketing, or some kind of listing optimization for Etsy search to drive that kind of growth?

From my understanding it's mostly organic, ranking well in Etsy search. I think she does paid ads to boost + supplement, but organic Etsy search is the primary growth channel. Which is also difficult and frustrating because you basically have to get really good at guessing what Etsy's algorithms are, which they change frequently (in other words, SEO but for Etsy). I don't think there's a magic bullet. A lot of trial and error

That is extortion.

Your sister should contact the FBI, as it is unlikely that she is the scammers' only target, and this crime likely crosses state (or international) borders.

If it crosses international borders (probably) the FBI is stopped.

Actually the amounts cited are well below the FBI's interest threshold in any case.

No, the FBI is not precluded from investigating cross-border crimes. They just have to work with their foreign counterparts on the investigation.

And the amounts cited are not below the FBI's interest threshold; the whole point of my comment is that their are probably other victims, which makes this a larger crime than just the OP's system and probably involves sophisticated or organized criminals. This makes it exactly the kind of crime the FBI loves to investigate.

>If it crosses international borders (probably) the FBI is stopped.

May you share a source for where you heard this information?

They didn't, they just made it up

FBI has relationships with certain countries. Criminals prefer to use countries they don't. For reasons.

Only 4 countries (Micronesia, North Korea, Palau and Tuvalu) are not participants in INTERPOL, and criminal organizations generally don't operate out of them...

Cooperation by many other countries is sharply limited.

It's not that astounding. The simple truth is that customers are not valuable enough to warrant human interaction.

Cheap and scalable server time? No problem.

Communication with actual people? Not unless there's an exodus of customers (and even then you're not big enough to matter).