No less than $75,000 in cryptocurrency (Bitcoin or Ether), or $100,000 in iTunes gift cards — this is the exorbitant ransom that cybercriminals have demanded from Apple. The group, calling themselves the Turkish Crime Family, claims to have stolen access to 300 million iCloud accounts, and have threatened to wipe them on April 7 (tomorrow) if the corporation doesn’t pay up.

The cybercriminals sent a series of screen shots to Motherboard that apparently show the exchange of emails between the hacker group and Apple’s security team. They also provided access to one of the email accounts that they allegedly used to communicate with the company and lay down their conditions for the deal.

According to the messages on the account, the cybercriminals uploaded videos to YouTube to show how they were able to log in to several stolen iCloud accounts and even showed how they were able to access an elderly woman’s photos and remotely delete them.

Apple Won’t Be Had So Easily

Allegedly, an Apple employee had asked the criminals to take down the video that they’d uploaded to YouTube. The company also declared, “We do not reward cyber criminals for breaking the law”.

There are a few holes in the attackers’ story. In the initial correspondence, they claimed to have accessed 300 million accounts on Apple’s iCloud, but on the Turkish Crime Family twitter account the claim was a more modest 200 million. In a later correspondence, the number jumped up to 559 million.

“I just want my money and thought this would be an interesting report that a lot of Apple customers would be interested in reading and hearing,” one of the hackers told Motherboard. It seems clear that one of the strategies of this group is to blackmail Apple by making their actions public, alarming as many Apple clients as possible.

However, a spokesperson for Apple has stated that “there have not been any breaches in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud and Apple ID.” The supposed list of email addresses and passwords may therefore have been obtained through a third-party service that had been previously compromised.

The spokesperson also stated that they are “actively monitoring to prevent unauthorized access to user accounts and are working with law enforcement to identify the criminals involved.” We’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see if there is a real threat, or if the hackers are simply bluffing.

In any event, the company has taken the opportunity to remind users to use robust passwords, that they don’t use the same credentials over various websites, and that they activate two-step authentication to add an extra layer of security.

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