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blackmail
Sign in to saveBlackmail is a criminal act of coercion using a threat.
~4 min read
Encyclopedic overview
6 sectionsContents
- Etymology
- Objections to criminalization
- See also
- Notes
- References
- External links
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:
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “blackmail” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.