alt Hacker NewsTBF as the author has pointed out, this particular scam doesn't seem to work at all - he has received multiple different bitcoin addresses to send money to over the years and none of them have ever received any money. So extortion might be difficult to prevent, but this one seems to be relatively benign.
You need a very low success rate to make spam pay though. If someone does pay $1,200 it covers a lot of emails sent.