For decades, extortion for money has been a powerful weapon for the Italian mafia to shakedown successful bussinesses and underworld operations. These extortions were legendary and such powerful images have been implemented in the American collective psyche through the popular gangster movies. Nowadays, mafia criminals wearing dark suits , glasses and threats of bloodshed are not a reality anymore. Due to the powerful Internet medium we are dealing with a new style of gangsterism, not quite visible but more powerful than in the past. This new-style  involves extortion of gambling websites carried out in the cyberspace by very powerful human forces, communicating demands all over the globe.

This is the case of the Russian mafia, extorting gambling websites of millions of dollars, hacking the websites and shuting down operations. Once a site is inoperable, the extortionists contact the website owners to ask for money. As a result, the afraid customers will place bets on rival gambling sites and produce great losses for a certain website owner. Nowadays, with the advancement of technology, Internet has emerged a popular multi-billion dollars industry and we are facing a new type of gambler, who preffers to stay  at home, in front of the computer instead of traveling to Las Vegas to wage bets. This kind of gambler will place online bets  to worldwide casinos.

Mafia criminals use software tools to hack into websites of online gambling, corporate bussiness and financial institutions, ripping off millions of dollars in what is becoming an increasing global epidemic. According to the law enforcement agencies there is an increasing number of reports of organized criminal gangs carrying out denial-of-service (DOS) attacks with the intention to blackmail online gambling and ecommerce websites. These attacks have seriously affected the online casinos, who rely on their Worldpay system for their transactions and payment services.

DK Matai of MI2G, which monitors unauthorized computer hacking has reported criminal syndicates operating  from Russia and Eastern Europe having targeted online payments systems, mostly belonging to gambling sites. Technically, DOS attacks involve flooding a website with malicious traffic and exhausting the servers with false requests, resulting a great number of  frustrated customers who will leave for a competing website. Most of this criminal attacks come from Russia, Eastern Europe and recently Brasil, countries with  a high level of programming talents and  this is possible mainly because of the lacking cyberlaws and government monitoring. In the given conditions, a good Internet connection with some basic hacking knowledge and DOS tools will make this quite an easy task.

These kind of actions produce a huge damage for the global economy with both denial-of-service and productivity losses. Such criminal actions are closely watched by the FBI  and the Britain`s Hi-Tech National Crime Unit (NCU) but a real evaluation of this situation is being hindered by the refusal of the victims to report the threat, as it might seriously put them to risk.