Sky News reports this week that hundreds of UK schools had to evacuate in response to 24,000 emails sent out carrying fake bomb threats, due to an apparent feud between Minecraft communities. As reported by Alexander Martin, Sky News was able to get in touch with one of the perpetrators who had deliberately falsified the emails so that they would appear to be from another community, VeltPvP, to schools demanding ransom payments of thousands of dollars with the threat that a bomb would be detonated inside the school if the ransom wasn’t paid. The intent, according to the participant, was to get the VeltPvP domain shut down.
We have had a number of calls this morning about a bomb hoax at many of our region’s schools. All of the schools have been spoken to and there is not believed to be any viable threats #ProudToProtect pic.twitter.com/iGafyMfAvx
— Northumbria Police (@northumbriapol) March 19, 2018
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Another of the alleged perpetrators attempted to justify the bomb threats as a response to allegations that VeltPvP had been attacking other servers and when asked if he felt remorse, another responded “I’m not going to lose sleep over it.”
We have nothing to do with the bomb threats that were sent out to the 400+ UK schools.
We’ve been being harassed by a group of cyber criminals that are trying to harass us in anyway possible.
We’re extremely sorry for anyone who had to deal with this, but just know it’s fake.
— VeltPvP (@VeltPvP) March 19, 2018
MMO Fallout 