Bitcoin Forum

May I ask what is the official stance on Extortion by the admins and the moderating team? Would such actions be allowed on this forum, or would they be deemed unethical and not be permitted?
I have recently seen a rise in scammers and trolls doxxing people and threatening them, and often requesting money and/or other services so that the victim is left alone. Would these actions be moderated, or like the trust system, "not moderated to prevent abuse"?

imho they are not moderated, but i suggest anybody who sees something like that to neg-rate them.

Not exactly sure. Would subtle threats alongside with demands (extortion) be considered as 'threats to inflict bodily harm'? EG: "I know where you live, so delete this post".

Extortion is frowned upon. If it is discovered that you are trying to extort a member then there is a good chance that you and your alts will receive negative trust.

Would the suggested course of action be to go public about who is extorting who, and the situation?

Open a scam accusation and/or report the PMs you are receiving to an admin. 

It depends on what their actions are I think, when it comes to general scammers the mods leave it alone, but if it involves real information through doxxing and genuine death threats that's when they'll take action. If you've got some scammer trying to blackmail you with negative ratings then post screenshot evidence and a warning up on the scam accusations board then people will know to ignore them.

There are indeed sellers out there who get blackmailed and extorted by people every now and then who think they can scam some easy coin off them to make them go away.

The jurisdiction that the forum operates in is the US. Blackmail is illegal there, as defined by (confusing part bolded). There are legal frameworks for taking down infringing content, but I do not know of any for taking down blackmail. However, if you believe you are being blackmailed (according to the above definition), it's always worth a shot to send theymos a PM.

Just for future reference, don't rely on the forum being 100% US. Various countries can claim that internet activity happens in the country of the user and so local laws apply. Now they might not immediately be able to enforce a foreign judgement in the US but they can certainly come after individuals.

This is best course of action.   Also it is important to know what are they trying to extort?  For example if you scammed someone and they say they will release info if you don't pay back..... not nice but could be justified if scammed.

I'm not pro doxing, I think it could be used for bad things.  But if it is a scammer and it helps someone get their money back I can see why doxing would be allowed.

But as a general rule no extortion is not good.  Report it.

Well, doxing is allowed here but im not sure if always, obviously doxing a scammer is not a bad thing since you may be able to take legal actions against him if enough info is provided, in the other hand if the scammers themselves dox people that are not scammers, i dont´t think that should be allowed.

it's not that it's allowed, more so that it's not disallowed. and that's quite the double standard you're suggesting; even if they are scammers, that's still a person's information. we can't have two sets of rules or morals for two sets of people, normal users and convicted scammers. I hate scammers all the same, but there needs to be 1 set rule about such a sensitive topic.

I explained quite clearly why doxing scammers could be useful, why can´t we have two sets of rules? Doxing a scammer can be helpful if you want to take legal actions against him, i think it´s quite clear.

i never said it wouldnt be useful. however, having 2 sets of rules? especially for something as touchy as doxxing? whats the advantage of that besides it being useful for a few cases, which as i stated before, would be a double standard? There is so much potential for exploitation when two sets of rules are applied for people in separate groups; what exactly would qualify for one to be judged under 1 ruleset? who or what group of people decides who falls into one category? its pretty hypocritical to have 2 rulesets, not to mention straight up discriminatory. if any real world nation were to have two sets of laws for different groups of people (males vs females, majority race vs minorities, etc) imagine the global outrage that would happen. or we can compare this to a more similar situation, a regular citizen vs a former convicted criminal that was released from jail. is it okay to go and assault said criminal because he robbed someone's home in the past, and is therefore judged under a special ruleset? no, thats still illegal to assault someone. not the best words to state my points, and im not sure i got the message across clearly, but hopefully you get the gist of what im trying to say here. the potential complications of judging people differently simply outweigh the few cases where scammers would be doxxed or whatever.