Criminals Are Staging a Devious New Kind of Kidnapping - and the FBI is Stumped. (businessinsider.com) 43
schwit1 shares a report: About 10 years ago, when Erik Arbuthnot first started hearing about phony-kidnapping hustles, his fellow agents at the FBI scoffed at the cases. "Don't worry about those," they told Arbuthnot. "Those are fake. We handle the real ones." Now the cases have become so widespread that the bureau has a name for them: virtual kidnappings. "It's a telephone extortion scheme," says Arbuthnot, who heads up virtual-kidnapping investigations for the FBI out of Los Angeles. Because many of the crimes go unreported, the bureau doesn't have a precise number on how widespread the scam is. But over the past few years, thousands of families like the Mendelsteins have experienced the same bizarre nightmare: a phone call, a screaming child, a demand for ransom money, and a kidnapping that -- after painful minutes, hours, or even days -- is revealed to be fake. There's the pastor in Memphis who, like Mendelstein, was told his daughter had been kidnapped. The man in Miami who thought his wife and baby daughter were being held for ransom. The guy in Missouri who got conned into thinking his elderly mother had been taken. Overall, the FBI reports, internet scams nearly doubled in 2020 -- and extortion cases like virtual kidnapping have rung up the third-most victims, right behind phishing schemes and phony sales calls.
This has been going on for a few years now. (Score:2)
Re:This has been going on for a few years now. (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like a click-bait if I ever saw one, here is a news article from 2017 describing how this very FBI task-force have been tracking this since at least 2013: https://www.fbi.gov/news/stori... [fbi.gov]
And two years ago the FBI El Paso Division did a press release warning the public for these types of calls: https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us... [fbi.gov]
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Somebody ought to do something about all this wire fraud. Perhaps some regulations about how people are allowed to use telephones would help.
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I recently went to the bank to send a wire transfer. I was asked several questions about why I was sending the money, and if it was in response to a request, by email or social media, from someone I don't know. The teller said the government requires them to ask the questions.
My kids' school has a "life skills" class that teaches budgeting, investing, credit cards, etc. Perhaps a section on common scams should be included.
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To be honest most kids are pretty savy with the internet, and I have to assume that applies to mobile devices too.
Its the older folks that get targetted. Back in the way-back-when my grandmother was regularly buying things from Spam email until me and my father found out and staged an intervention..
One of my parents friend fell for the Nigerian Prince scam *multiple times over* With the scammer telling her things like "oh no the government siezed that money, I think I need to hire a lawyer to try and get it
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Put another way, savvyness of a demographic is large
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I remember first hearing about it in 2004. I assume it was going on long before I heard about it.
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Trash clickbait. msmash is a joke.
Common in Brazil (Score:2)
This is very common in Brazil. They usually call late at night since the victim will be confused and will be more inclined to fall for the scam. They tend to target the elderly.
Grandparent Scam (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Grandparent Scam (Score:2)
How the fuck do you not know where your kid is? (Score:2)
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Two points:
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Part of the way scammers work is by providing a reason why you aren't allowed to talk to anyone. If it's a fake kidnapping, they'll threaten to hurt the victim if you bring someone else onto the call. If it's a "we'll make you rich if you help us" scam, they'll threaten to cut the whole thing off if you let anyone else in on the plan.
This is actually a warning sign that something is shady. Real investment advisors don't mind if you let your friends and family know you're talking to them. Heck, they're
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Some teenagers have an annoying habit of disobeying. They'll leave their phone with a friend, have someone help remove/defeat tracking, have panic attacks and mental health crises if you try to track them (even if you assure them you aren't watching their every move).
Also, kids are still your kids when they are young adults. Just like our own parents' lament, they don't call much. So it isn't too hard to be fooled into believing that they have been abducted. Unless they happen to be in your basement or
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Or, of course, you don't have any children/grandchildren to worry about.
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However if they have a phone (or are supposed to be with other people), tracking them should be a fairly simple matter
You track your kids phones? I thought about doing it, but ultimately decided that at 10+ they could be trusted with the freedom of not having mom and dad tracking their every move with a gps locator, and the responsibility of checking in with their location when appropriate rested with them.
There were a couple incidents over the years, where instead of coming home they went to the mall with a friend or something, and forgot to check in and had the phone in their bag where they weren't hearing notifications.
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You track your kids phones?
Yes, and no. I *can* find out where my kid - and grand-kid - is at any given moment, but I almost never do. We set up location sharing primarily so that we'd know where each other is on the long (8 hours) drive from their house to ours, when either of us travel to visit. Aside from that, I don't bother tracking them. It's nice to have if we need it.
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That's probably a 'yes' in your kids opinion though.
Whether you actually check or not is a very important detail, but you always can, and they don't know if you do, so it shifts the trust burden from you trusting them to keep you apprised of where they are, to them trusting you not to abuse their privacy.
And if there is somewhere they aren't supposed to go, or somewhere they're supposed to be -- and you have it on, you can always check on them, instead of relying on them to be honest. I think its pretty im
Re: How the fuck do you not know where your kid is (Score:2)
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"The phone company and the government can do the same thing, without the app."
What on earth is your point? To gain access to it would require either corruption or a warrant, and it's quite bit of a higher bar to get at in most cases.
"Better for your kids to have it "in their face" and learn that fact, if they don't want you tracking them then they can figure out how to hide their trail."
Are you really that confused about the difference between your parents and the NSA? And if you think lying to your parents
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That's probably a 'yes' in your kids opinion though.
Except my kid is an adult, is technically savvy, and could turn off tracking at any time, if they felt I was violating their privacy. I didn't even ask them to do it: I just asked them to let me know when they hit town on one of their trips home so my wife and I could stop worrying about them being on the road. They turned on tracking and said, "Follow me" so we could see where they were on the trip. I guess it was easier than texting late at night when they got here. They just never turned it off, and
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Ah well, yes, there is a difference their between an adult location sharing with his parents, and a parent turning it on and expecting it to be left turned on on their kids phones.
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Something similar happened to a friend of mine in Taiwan. The scammers failed because they actually had someone pretending to be her, and the fake spoke the wrong dialect. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with the scam, but it works because the scammers don't have to get money every time to get ahead.
Re:How the heck do you not know where your kid is? (Score:3)
I used to feel this way, but not anymore.
My wife got one of these calls about a month ago. It was for our 20 year old son who was supposed to be in Mexico at the time. She said that the voice sounded spot on, the accent was perfect. She was sure that the person on the phone was our son. The person pretending to be my son said he had been in a car accident and that someone had been hurt. He said he was in jail, and he needed help. She couldn't believe it wasn't our son even when she went downstairs a
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Modus operandi (Score:4, Insightful)
It was controlled at some point by jamming cell phone signals at jails and penitentiaries. Plus educating the population at large about the approach.
Obviously this is a bit more sophisticated and happening overseas, but the principles and approaches are fairly similar.
Ask to talk to them (Score:2)
Always ask if you can say a few words to your supposedly kidnapped kid. If the "kidnappers" refuse, tell them they're lying and hang up. Real kidnappers want to get paid and will do minimum things to prove their case.
Of course they may do more than the minimum [nytimes.com], but at least then you know they really do have your kid.
This exact con happened to my mother 15 years ago (Score:3)
She called me at work, frantic, because she was told that I was being held at gunpoint because of my alleged gambling debts. They even had someone sobbing and whispering, claiming to be me. The scammers had managed to compile enough public information to make the extortion attempt seem plausible. Thankfully, my doppelganger used a word, "momma", which I'd never use. That gave her enough suspicion to call me.
I drove to her place, and waited for the scammers to call back. I managed to get her to say enough of the "right" things to get a callback number, which we gave to the sheriff. It was a burner phone number, and it was deactivated by the end of the day. But, it was worth a shot. They did whatever forensics they do, but the trail was pretty cold. These scammers aren't dumb. Virtual or not, there's a hefty prison sentence involved if they are caught.
Thankfully, she was wise enough to be suspicious and to call me the moment things didn't add up. Since then, I've trained my parents and my grandparents on how to spot cons and how to just terminate communication and contact someone they trust the moment something doesn't feel right. If they try to keep you on the phone, pull up SMS, Messenger, etc. Whatever you do, don't keep secrets from loved ones, even if someone has convinced you that you've done something wrong.
It's not perfect -- if it were possible to avoid scams and cons we'd be taught how to do so in school. But, familiarity helps to reduce the likelihood that they will become victims. Every time I hear of a new type of scam or con, I run through it with them.
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This must be very stressful. But why don't more people do what your mother did.... call the police, FBI, call **YOU**?
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It's all predicated by fear. These con artists are very good at catching people off-balance. They make it clear that something bad will happen to their loved one if they go to the police. In newer versions of the con, they are warned that even hanging up the phone is enough for them to do whatever it is they are going to do.
This con works by keeping the pressure high and making it clear that the only way out is to do whatever the person on the other line says. If their victim pushes back, they will get the
nothing's new (Score:2)
You want a toe, i can get you a toe (Score:2)
This is pretty much the plot of the big lebowski isn't it?
Fucking amateurs!
We have such telephone scams in Japan for decades (Score:2)
They are not about kidnapping but crooks calling elderly people with the message 'It's me. I need some money urgently.'.
Crooks try to convince the elderly people that they are talking to their son in order to have them send a ton of cash.
The Japanese police doesn't do shit about them although they have every means at their disposal to trace back every phone call.
... and the FBI is stumped! (Score:1)
You're going to be hearing this a lot in the coming months, but it's not always going to be true. At least half the time they'll be actively involved and only confused about how to keep hiding it.
Very common in Argentina (Score:2)
They put quite a show and ask for a lowball ransom, walk them through paying it and just disappear