Oh dear Lord!
Makes perfect business sense, keep 'em happy and they'll tell all their friends, and more importantly they'll keep coming back for more!
Three out of four ransomware criminal gangs are willing to negotiate the shakedown price. And all the operators of file encrypting ransomware scams will give victims more time to pay up. So say security researchers at F-Secure, who investigated the "customer experience" of five active crypto-ransomware variants, beginning with …
"As such, crypto-ransomware families often operate similar to legitimate businesses, with accessible web pages, helpful FAQs, "free trials" for file decryption, and even customer support channels staffed by responsive agents."
I was thinking this actually sounds much better than TalkTalk...
Now there is "fake" ransomware doing the rounds (that just irretrievably messes files up, as opposed to reversibly encrypting them) the pedlars of "real" ransomware have to go out of their way to persuade the victim to pay up, rather than write it off as a bad job and restart from scratch.
I also can't see the fake ransomware lasting long in the wild -- it's a threat to a criminal gang's business model, after all.