Those chilling words, the worst nightmare of any
parent, came over the telephone, spoken by a man planning to demand
money for her safe return.
One catch: We have no daughter. So the call, for us,
was easy enough to ignore. But thousands of Mexicans receive these
calls every week. Sometimes they are real; a child or spouse or other
relative has been kidnapped, and a ransom is demanded.
Often, they’re bogus.
A cottage industry has exploded alongside the skyrocketing kidnapping rate in
that could be called “extortion on spec”: telephoned shakedowns that
play on fears, in which the perpetrators scamming for pesos make random
calls.
And as any cold-call telemarketer will tell you,
dial long enough and someone will take the bait, whether it’s magazine
subscriptions, too-good-to-be-true mortgage rates … or a ransom
demand.
These calls “provoke such terrible anguish and panic
that many victims don’t bother to check out the claim, and they fall
for the trick,” said
“It has been growing as a phenomenon because it works.”
When our would-be extortionist called our home
telephone, my husband answered. A weepy girl’s voice (or, more
probably, a woman feigning to be a girl) said, “Papi, papi, they’ve got
me!”
Then a man came on to declare they had our “daughter.” My husband said he didn’t have a daughter, and the caller hung up.
Every Mexican seems to know someone who has had a
similar thing happen. Sometimes these callers are so off base, as in
our case, that they can be dismissed. A colleague received a threat
saying his son had been kidnapped; he’s the father of four girls.
Often, the call is close enough to instill terror,
even when it’s phony. Many Mexicans tell of late-night ransom calls
when their kids are out on the town or at the movies; frantic,
heart-stopping minutes pass until they reach their child by cell phone.
Friends tell of a child walking into the house minutes before the money
was to be paid. And still other people pay.
Usually, the caller demands an electronic transfer of money into an account. Sometimes the mark is asked to pay in person.
A recent report by the Ministry of Public Security
said one of the most common forms of phone extortion is for the caller
to pretend to represent one of the notorious drug gangs terrorizing
In 2008, the last full year for which statistics are
available, authorities received 50,138 formal complaints of various
kinds of phone extortion. The figure is believed to be a small fraction
of the number of actual frauds attempted and committed. Among those
complainants, 4,587 people paid the demanded amount, the report said.
In the first two months of last year, an additional 3,575 complaints
were filed.
A team of suspected extortionists arrested in
October allegedly telephoned the victim and told him they’d placed
snipers outside his business and would begin picking off his family
unless he paid
The vast majority of the calls originate in
overcrowded prisons. One report by the official news agency Notimex
said inmates and others were making about 500 calls a day using
smuggled cell phones, of which 2 percent resulted in someone paying.
And in a new, timely twist, callers have been telling marks to fork
over money to get access to vaccines for swine flu, which has been
infecting much of
Although the number of extortion attempts has soared
in the last five years, the good news, authorities say, is that the
percentage of people who fall for the scam and pay is shrinking. Word
of mouth and news reports have contributed to greater awareness and
more people are tracking down their loved ones before paying ransoms.
De la Barreda’s group tells people to ask basic questions of the caller to test the authenticity of the threat.
“This is a crime that requires no organization, no
resources, no accomplices, just a little luck,” he said. “It is an easy
crime.”
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(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
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