Fake DDoS attack threatening .US domain names

A fake DDOS ATTACK threatening .us domain names has started today. The scam is targeting owners of .us (for now) domain names by harvesting email addresses from domain name whois and then emailing a threat.

Seems that every scammer in the world is using the domain name whois info.

The email that claims to be coming from the “Anonymous hackers group” asks the domain name and website owners to make a Bitcoin payment and if they don’t an DDoS attack will start with service going down permanently.

I say it is fake as this is not something the Anonymous group is doing and it is clear that they have not even visited the domain name to see that there is not website there but just a landing page.

I have received the following email about 3 of my .us domain names in the past couple of hours:

“We are Anonymous hackers group.
Your site *********.US will be DDoS-ed starting in 24 hours if you don’t pay only 0.1 Bitcoins @ 18z*****************************
Users will not be able to access sites host with you at all.
If you don’t pay in next 24 hours, attack will start, your service going down permanently. Price to stop will increase to 1 BTC and will go up 1 BTC for every day of attack.
If you report this to media and try to get some free publicity by using our name, instead of paying, attack will start permanently and will last for a long time.
This is not a joke.
Our attacks are extremely powerful – over 1 Tbps per second. No cheap protection will help.
Prevent it all with just 0.1 BTC @ 18z********************************
Do not reply, we will not read. Pay and we will know its you. AND YOU WILL NEVER AGAIN HEAR FROM US!
Bitcoin is anonymous, nobody will ever know you cooperated.”