A Berlin man has been charged with blackmailing the UK's National Health Service (NHS) and threatening to bomb a hospital . The perpetrator demanded £10 million in Bitcoin from the service in order to not carry out his threat .
The defendant is named Emil Apreda, he is 33 years old, Italian and a resident of Berlin.
On Friday, the judge at the Berlin District Criminal Court sentenced Apreda to prison three years
According to the charges, Apreda sent threatening emails to the NHS between April and June 2020, in which he said he would detonate a bomb in a UK hospital. He would only back down if the NHS gave him £10 million in cryptocurrency.
Nigel Leary, Deputy Director of the UK 's National Cyber Crime Unit (NCA), said the culprit had been threatening the NHS for around 6 weeks.
The first threatening email was sent on April 25, during the first lockdown in the UK. The NHS was the first to receive the email with the threat of a hospital bombing. A few hours later, the defendant sent the same email to the NCA.
Apreda also exploited current events. He tried to exploit the pandemic COVID-19, but he also claimed to plant explosives at Black Lives Matter protests. In addition, the intelligence agency says Apreda threatened to endanger the safety of members of parliament.
The NCA believes Apreda's threats to the NHS and elsewhere were a "social engineering" attempt to pressure the situation and obtain the Bitcoins he was demanding. The intelligence agency does not actually believe Apreda had access to explosive materials.
The NHS did not respond to the blackmail attempts
Prosecutors said the blackmail and threats continued until his arrest in June.
Apreda's trial began on December 11 in Germany. He has now been convicted, but has been released on bail until the verdict is confirmed.
The NCA took Apreda’s case seriously. The investigation into the culprit required a “robust and significant response,” according to the agency. The potential risk was heightened when Apreda claimed to be part of “Combat 18,” which while not designated as a terrorist organization in the UK, is still a group with extremist and far-right leanings.
Hospitals , by their nature, are open spaces and are always crowded. During the first lockdown, especially, they were one of the few places that had so many people gathered. So the threat of a bombing of an NHS hospital was a very significant issue .
Apreda was not extradited, but would face “similar” charges in the UK, according to the NCA.
Source: ZDNet
