Long story short - using my old account on Reddit, I troll posted in one of the cryptocurrency sub-reddits saying how I put nearly my whole life savings into a cryptocurrency coin (obviously I did not, it was just for trolling and entertainment purposes). A day later, a redditor with 0 post history messaged me with the title "Wake Up" listing my full name, address, where I work, ethnicity, some of my general interests based off my post history, etc. and demanded roughly $1800 worth of the coin to be sent to his wallet. I began to lose my mind and freak out like crazy.
At first, I was very curious as how he obtained my personal information but my old reddit account name was the same exact name used for my g-mail account and if you had searched my name, my PDF resume (which had my address on it) from 2 years ago would show up as well as my Linkedin profile. that's when I realized how he got all this info. I told him I was going to direct this message to the police and asked in an aggressive manner what the hell he was going to do about it and he calmly goes on to say, "You'll never find me but I found you. I'll give you another 10 hours to send me it. This is my last message." I'm taking this as a very legitimate threat and debating if I need to take action and seriously report this to the local police? What is the best way to handle this situation?
It looks like you have something that still has any relationship with your real identity or that was someone very close to you. If he was from another country and that will be useless to take an action by reporting him to the local police. I think if he was in another sea and you will be safe. But not for your data. I suggest you forget it and then try to take a better action by never try to make anything that has any potential to reveal your identity to the internet.