Blackmail

Blackmail is the offense of threatening to reveal embarrassing, damaging or incriminating information about a person unless they pay money or provide some other benefit, a specific form of coercion distinguished from general extortion by its particular method, the threatened disclosure of true or false information rather than a threat of violence or property damage. Because the information threatened need not itself be criminal or even false, blackmail can be committed by threatening to reveal a genuinely true but embarrassing fact, and most legal systems criminalize this regardless of the information's truth, on the theory that the wrong lies in the coercive demand rather than in whether the underlying disclosure would itself have been lawful. Many jurisdictions prosecute blackmail under their general extortion statute rather than as a separately named offense, treating the threat to disclose information as simply one recognized form the threat element of extortion can take, while others retain blackmail as its own distinct offense with its own statutory elements. The offense has taken on a significant online dimension in recent decades, most notably sextortion, in which an offender threatens to release intimate images or material unless paid or granted further compliance, a pattern that has made blackmail an increasingly cyber-enabled offense even where it is not itself classified as a dedicated cybercrime.