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Comment by yabones | Hacker News Reader

If this is real, $50,000 USD is a laughably small sum for the database. It reminds me of Dr. Evil's demand for 'one million dollars', you have to jack up the number to be taken seriously.

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Was at a small startup. We kept begging CEO to raise prices so customers would take us seriously and stop laughing at us. Finally he tripled the prices.

We started landing new customers like crazy and in a few months got to 1,000 monthly paying customers. Same products.

Customers might reasonably believe you won’t be able to provide the advertised service if the price is infeasibly low.

This is old-skool salesmanship. If you don't make it expensive, the sales prospect won't think it's valuable.

Apple has known this since they were founded.

No, it's more that if your prices are too low it's either a scam or you're terrible at business. In both cases, you're not a trustworthy business partner.

I'm immediately reminded of Dr. Evil's demand for... one million dollars!

Also for a company the size of Microsoft, 30 million accounts seems very small. What user accounts would this database even contain?

This whole thing seems a bit fishy.

MITM'd login services perhaps? It does seem like a small number for Microsoft. Like robbing a bank and making off with $50

Could be an event like Microsoft Build conference or something.

Or the 100 "sample" accounts are sourced from unrelated phishing and there is no breach. Most of the phishing emails I get lately are trying to get me to fill out a fake MS login page.

Almost like it might be a scam, odd

A bug bounty would possibly have a bigger payout lol

This is possibly from some other breach and nothing to do with MS

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