To top things off, Qaiser also attacked the advertising networks that tried to stop him, flooding their sites with denial of service attacks and threatening to spam them with child sex abuse images. When he was sectioned under the country's Mental Health Act, he used hospital WiFi to access the same ad networks he'd used for the sextortion campaign. He was arrested in December for laundering £120,000 ($157,000) while on bail.

It's not clear exactly how many people paid the fine, although the National Crime Agency estimated that roughly 8,000 users might have paid the ransom. Judge Timothy Lamb characterized Qaiser's campaign as so far-reaching that there didn't appear to be other cases with "anything comparable." You might not see other cases on this scale for a while, although there are few technical obstacles to preventing similar blackmail schemes.