Why are cyber criminals sending their demands by snail mail?

Cyber criminals really will try anything, it seems. A group claiming to be the ransomware operators BianLian recently sent extortion letters to a company’s executives the old-fashioned way — in the mail.

According to TechRadar, the scammers said in their letters that they had gained access to the target company’s systems. The letter stated that the scammers had obtained sensitive customer and employee information, as well as other sensitive HR information. They demanded payments of $250,000 to $350,000 in bitcoin within 10 days and included a QR code to make the payments.

However, cybersecurity outlet GuidePoint Security reports that both the letters and the ransomware attack are fake. There was no evidence whatsoever that the target organization’s systems had been compromised. The contents of the letters didn’t match the BianLian ransomware operation that they claimed to be from, and the wording was inconsistent with ransom notes sent by that group in the past. Maybe these scammers were just trying to get attention by using unconventional methods like snail mail.