blackmail

Coercion based on threat of revealing information

Instance of: type of crime
Subclass of: coercion
, extortion

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Blackmail is a criminal act of coercion using a threat. As a criminal offense, blackmail is defined in various ways in common law jurisdictions. In the United States, blackmail is generally defined as a crime of information, involving a threat to do something that would cause a person to suffer embarrassment or financial loss. By contrast, in the Commonwealth its definition is wider: for example, the laws of England and Wales and Northern Ireland state that:A person is guilty of blackmail if, with a view to gain for himself or another or with intent to cause loss to another, he makes any unwarranted demand with menaces...

Overview

All data

23 statements · 9% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Uses: threat main subject: information leak, embarrassment
Different from: Blackmail
Partially coincident with: extortion

On other databases

16 identifiers linking blackmail across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

externally sourced

Source last edited October 18, 2026. AIDb refreshes this page daily.

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AIDb. (2026). blackmail (Q34284). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/blackmail-Q34284