| | |  Editorials | Issues 
Telephoned Abduction Claims Bedeviling Mexico
 Tracy Wilkinson - Los Angeles Times
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February 09, 2010
| | Many tell of late-night ransom calls when their kids are out on the town; frantic, heart-stopping minutes pass until they reach their child by cell phone. | |
Mexico City — “We have your daughter.”
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 Mexico 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.
These calls “provoke such terrible anguish and panic that many victims don’t bother to check out the claim,” said Luis de la Barreda, director of the Citizens’ Institute for the Study of Crime.
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.
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; 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.
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 Mexico, such as La Familia, based in the state of Michoacán, or the Zetas, a ruthless network of hired hit men.
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. |
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