Leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance is currently in the midst of a huge blackmail campaign against the firm by users who are obviously trying to get some sort of financial gain from their illicit activities. Blackmail is of course huge within cryptocurrency. The anonymity of the blockchain means that criminals are able to bribe and blackmail other users quite easily. Thankfully though, the likes of Binance are very unlikely to fall for this. So, what’s happened?  According to Engadget, hackers are claiming to have accessed a huge amount of personal user data, including passport scans and identification documents. The documents relate to Binance’s own users and, if they are telling the truth, could provide to be very powerful weapons against Binance if such personal data was ever released. The hackers claim to have the private data of over 10,000 users and are demanding 300BTC, or around $3,500,000.00 at the time of writing in return for their word that they won’t release the data.  There have also been reports that some of this data has already made its way to Telegram, so in this instance, the hackers could actually be telling the truth. As it stands though, Binance don’t seem too worried about what might happen here, especially given that they claim to have seen some of the leaked images on Telegram, according to Engadget: “Binance said in its statement that there are inconsistencies when comparing this data to the data in its system, and at the present time, no evidence has been supplied that indicates any KYC images have been obtained from Binance, largely because the images do not contain the digital watermark imprinted by its system.” There is of course (with this in mind) a huge chance that the images leaked by the hackers are fake, especially if Binance are correct in saying images from their database would include a Binance watermark over the picture. Either way though, Binance are now under a lot of pressure to try and locate this person in order to ensure the authorities can do something about them; otherwise, as it stands, there is still a risk that private data could be published. If this happens, Binance will be in very big trouble indeed. It’s unlikely any ransom will be paid for now, hopefully the security team there can now try and get to the bottom of what’s going on.