How exactly is this a criminal enterprise? The community needs this. In fact, I think BitcoinTalk administrators should be pressured to moderate the alt-coin announcement forums more severely
I thought I spelled this out VERY clearly, but lets try again.
Extortion is a crime.
Extortion is intimidating people into paying you money, and if they don't bad things will happen to them.
These thugs are requiring alt coin providers to pay them a fee (20 BTC), and if they don't pay, they destroy they coin and launch a DDOS attack against pools mining it.
Two of the organizers are themselves creators of shit coins. The just want to reduce the competition so the price of their coins go up.
Other organizers are pool operators who are excited about getting idiotic sheep to launch DDOS attacks against their competitors.
But it has NOTHING to do with cleaning up alt coins. If a coin dev pays, they won't touch that coin, no matter how shitty it is.
That is extortion. No question about it.