Cyber criminals took Stuart Kettell's wedding and corporate videos hostage, along with his own family albums.
He did not answer the demand for $1,000 - about Â£700 - and paid the price with irreplaceable memories lost forever.
Mr Kettell's work was backed up on a separate drive so although the attack cost him precious time, his clients' videos were safe.
But photographs of his late parents and his children were wiped out.
The managing director of Kettell Video Production in Coventry saw the files on his computer "ghosting" - being copied elsewhere.
He said: "They were going to white squares with an encryption code at the bottom and and every minute another file was ghosting out.
"I clicked on this help file and at the top it said I had to pay in Bitcoin, and there was no way I could retrieve my files unless I paid this ransom.
"It really shocked me, I couldn't believe it.
"Pictures of my mother and father who have passed away and all the children, all the family portraits [are gone].
"All the precious memories it started worming its way through."
He said he felt "really angry" and "had no idea" why he did not go to the police.
"It's a ransom, you know. If you get someone come to your front door and kidnap your child and demand a ransom - that's a massive police inquiry and this is the same thing - they're taking away precious memories and hard work and I didn't think of going to the police - when I look back I think that's crazy."
An experiment by BBC Inside Out showed how people's personal details could be stolen when they logged on through a public wi-fi connection.
It showed a so-called man-in-the middle attack - using a device that can be bought online for about Â£100.
Volunteers were visibly shocked to see their personal details being hacked in minutes.
It took technology expert Madeline Cheah just 10 minutes to log the personal details of a roomful of people.
Their usernames and passwords were then revealed to them by presenter Qasa Alom.
Tips on how to keep web hackers at bay
Police are treating cyber crime as seriously as terrorism, says Det Insp Rob Harris who heads up the new cyber crime unit in the West Midlands.
He said: "Criminals are morphing and actually changing the way they commit criminality and more and more now they are turning to online to scam people out of their money, so of course we are changing with it.
"The government declared [cyber crime] a couple of years ago as a tier one issue for the UK. That puts it up there on the same sort of footing as terrorism."
Det Insp Harris added: "This is a global problem. The police aren't going to be able to arrest their way out of this issue.
"It's actually everybody in society playing that little part to make sure they do something to help themselves."
Dr Siraj Shaikh, a lecturer at Coventry University, is teaching the next generation of students how to avoid falling victim to online criminals.
Research has found simple steps to being more careful can stop 80% of cyber scams, he said.
"Increasingly our online behaviour, our online banking our, online shopping - everything is being able to be digitally captured," Dr Siraj Shaikh said.
"All that data about us is out there and everything is exposed.
"As with ordinary crime there are people who are doing it as a matter of opportunity equally there are organized gangs.
"There are all sorts out there and we just need to make sure that we take precautions and protect ourselves better."
Inside Out West Midlands is broadcast on BBC One on Monday 1, February at 19:30 GMT and nationwide on the iPlayer for 30 days thereafter.

Filming for Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur will begin on Monday and last for six days, Snowdonia National Park Authority has confirmed.
The Guy Ritchie film will star Charlie Hunnam as King Arthur and Jude Law as the villain Vortigern.
Velocity Productions will be filming in and around Capel Curig, Nant Gwynant and Pen y Gwryd.
Meanwhile, Bangor University has just extended its archive about Arthur after Flintshire council donated its Arthurian Collection.
A videographer has told of how online hackers held him to ransom.
[NEXT_CONCEPT]
Snowdonia's renowned natural beauty is to play a starring role in a Hollywood film featuring Jude Law.