Apple Inc. is allegedly being held ransom by a group of hackers who are threatening to wipe data from millions of Apple devices in two weeks if the company doesn’t pay them.

According to Motherboard, the group, who goes by the name of “Turkish Crime Family,” is claiming to have login credentials for hundreds of millions of icloud.com, me.com and mac.com email addresses. If Apple doesn’t pay the equivalent of $75,000 in bitcoin or Ethereum, or alternatively $100,000 in iTunes gift cards, the group said, it will access customer accounts and remotely wipe their Apple devices.

“I just want my money and thought this would be an interesting report that a lot of Apple customers would be interested in reading and hearing,” a member of Turkish Crime Family is reported to have stated.

Apple has not confirmed whether the demand is real, saying only that if the data is legitimate it was not obtained through any hack of Apple. “There have not been any breaches in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud and Apple ID,” a spokesman told Forbes. “The alleged list of email addresses and passwords appears to have been obtained from previously compromised third-party services.”

The hackers are said to have since shared screenshots of their communications with the Apple security team, the email address they used to contact the company, and a YouTube video of them using the alleged credentials to access an iCloud account. That last prompted Apple to send a takedown request.

Where the story does go astray is with the numbers of accounts the hackers allegedly have access to. There are separate claims that they have the credentials for 300 million accounts and then 559 million accounts, although some outlets are also claiming the group is claiming to have details for 627 million accounts.

No matter what the number, the hackers have given Apple a deadline of April 7 to pay up.

“We are doing this because we can and mainly to spread awareness for Karim Baratov and Kerem Albayrak, which both are being detained for the Yahoo hack and one of them is most probably facing heavy sentencing in America,” a representative for the group told PC World. “Kerem Albayrak on the other hand is being accused of listing the database for sale online.”

Photo: therichbrooks/Flickr