DailyMail.com
The call comes out of the blue. Perhaps, you recognize the number.
‘We have your daughter,’ shouts a strangely menacing voice on the line. ‘Send us money or she dies.’
‘Mommy, please help.’ Your heart stops. It’s your child’s voice.
The call comes out of the blue. Perhaps, you recognize the number.
‘We have your daughter,’ shouts a strangely menacing voice on the line. ‘Send us money or she dies.’
‘Mommy, please help.’ Your heart stops. It’s your child’s voice.
‘They tell the victims to isolate themselves, and they monitor them through Facetime calls or Skype,’ said Casey Warren, chief of Riverdale police. ‘The victims comply out of fear their families will be harmed if they don’t.’
It’s not exactly clear what these con artists told the teenager, Kai Zhuang, that convinced him to believe such a bizarre ploy, but nonetheless he apparently became an unwitting accomplice. He was discovered by police ‘very cold and scared’ and in want of a hot cheeseburger but otherwise unharmed.
Riverdale police said the crime was new to them, but fraudsters have been perfecting the scam for decades.
Mike Vigil, former chief of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, first came across the scheme in Mexico more than two decades ago. ‘It became a cottage industry, run by people both in and out of the Mexican prison system,’ he told DailyMail.com. Convicts would bribe prison guards to give them cellphones, then the crooks would open the phonebook and start calling numbers at random.
‘Criminals made money very quickly, and it was easy to do,’ explains Vigil. ‘And when a scheme is successful, other criminal gangs notice and begin to copy it.’
By the mid-2000s, the con had spread and now it’s operated by syndicates out of China and the Philippines.
Police in Sydney, Australia noticed a surge in cyber kidnappings in 2020: at least eleven cases with ransoms amounting to $2.6 million. Chinese foreign exchange students were targeted and told by a Mandarin-speaking fraudster, claiming to be from the Chinese government or police, that there was a problem with their visa or passport.