Chinese State Newspaper Warns of Bitcoin Extortion Scam Using Its Name
Imagine getting an email from a major news outlet threatening to publish a damaging investigation about your company — unless you pay up in Bitcoin. That’s exactly the scam a Chinese state-affiliated newspaper says is being run in its name.
China Business Journal, a publication founded in 1985 and run under the Institute of Industrial Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, issued a public warning that fraudsters have been impersonating the outlet to extort Bitcoin payments from targeted companies. According to the newspaper’s statement, scammers contacted businesses through Proton Mail addresses, claiming to have uncovered damaging information through undercover investigations and threatening to publish it unless the company paid in Bitcoin to make the story disappear.
The newspaper says the emails were entirely unauthorized, that the scheme appears to constitute fraud, and that it is now gathering evidence with an eye toward pursuing both civil and criminal action against whoever is behind it. It also used the warning to help legitimate businesses tell the difference between real reporting inquiries — which come through official channels — and these fraudulent, Bitcoin-denominated shakedown attempts.
The scam itself isn’t new in structure; extortion schemes threatening reputational damage unless paid off are a well-worn playbook. What’s notable is the choice of both disguise and payment method: borrowing the credibility of an established, government-linked publication to make the threat feel more credible, while demanding Bitcoin specifically because it’s harder to trace and easier to move across borders than a wire transfer a bank might flag or reverse.
It’s also a pattern crypto-adjacent businesses in particular should recognize, since crypto companies are disproportionately targeted by exactly this kind of scheme — an unverified email claiming insider knowledge, a countdown before publication, and a Bitcoin address instead of an invoice. The advice from security researchers in cases like this is consistent: legitimate journalists don’t demand payment to kill a story, full stop, and any email that does should be treated as fraud regardless of what name is attached to it.
For a newspaper with decades of institutional credibility, having its name borrowed for a crypto extortion scheme is its own small sign of how normalized Bitcoin has become as the demanded currency of choice — for scammers just as much as for legitimate investors.
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