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.
Panicked, a family does whatever they’re told to secure their loved one’s release from an apparent kidnapping, including wiring tens of thousands of dollars, immediately, to a specified account or even dropping a bag of cash on a street corner.
Hours or even minutes later, the dust settles and a bemused daughter, on vacation in Mexico or skiing on a remote mountain slope, would check their phone and learn of the chaos. The truth of the scam would sink in: no one was ever in any danger.
This is called ‘virtual’ or ‘cyber kidnapping’ and it first emerged in the 1990s, as a modern take on an old con. Quite simply, it’s an extortion scheme that involves criminals convincing unsuspecting people that their family members are in danger.
Now, with the widespread availability of artificial intelligence, advanced video communications and mobile phones, the swindle has morphed into something significantly more sophisticated, terrifying, and incredibly lucrative – to the tune of billions of dollars in illicit profits.
On New Year’s Eve, police in Utah rescued a 17-year-old Chinese exchange student, who had been convinced by criminals to run away from his American host family and confine himself to a tent in the snow-flecked hills above the town of Riverdale. There he took fake ‘ransom photos’ – which his tormentors sent to his family in China.
His petrified parents paid $80,000 to secure his release – not realizing he was never actually being held, but rather brainwashed into willingly going along with the scam.
‘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.
Preying on a young Chinese person’s belief that they were being watched by the state, and their fear of the overarching power of the authorities, they would comply. The marks were convinced to fake ransom photos, which were sent to relatives.
The images are shocking: a young woman lies on the floor, a blindfold over her eyes, hands seemingly bound behind her back, with a large kitchen knife menacingly placed before her. A young man sits half-naked, wearing only his underwear on a cold tile floor, his legs tied at the ankles with bloodied rope. Another woman is pictured on the ground with torn clothing, hugging her knees to her chest.
Kai Zhuang’s case in Utah bears strong resemblance to these Australian scams – and has led the Chinese embassies in Washington DC, Sydney and London this week to reiterate warnings to be wary. But these new-age kidnappers are using ever-more imaginative ways of tricking people.
In April, an Arizona mother, Jennifer DeStefano, was called from an unknown number while her 15-year-old daughter Briana was on a ski vacation.
She remembers hearing her own ‘daughter’s voice crying and sobbing, saying: ‘Mom, these bad men have me. Help me, help me.”’ DeStefano said she had no doubt it was her child,
‘It was her inflection. It was the way she would have cried,’ DeStefano recalls. ‘I never doubted for one second it was her. That’s the freaky part that really got me to my core.’
Yet, it wasn’t DeStefano’s Briana. The scammers demanded $1 million, but DeStefano’s husband managed to confirm Briana was fine before they paid up.
The voice Jennifer DeStefano heard was likely generated by artificial intelligence. By employing deepfake technology criminals can use even short snippets of videos posted on social media to create realistic imitations.
Virtual kidnappers have also hacked into phone contact lists or trawled their victim’s social media to spin wildly convincing lies.
One Houston man in May 2022 had his phone hacked and received a call from his mother’s number. A voice on the other end said they had her, and would harm her unless he transferred $900 by the payment app Venmo – which he quickly did.
Minutes later his brother replied to his panicked text and said their parents were sleeping upstairs, their phones with them, oblivious to the scam.
‘If someone rings and asks for money, the best tactic is always to hang up,’ cybercrime expert Adam Levin told DailyMail.com.
Levin, host of the podcast What The Hack advised that one should immediately contact law enforcement and try to reach their loved one.
He also suggests listening for tell-tale signs of strange audio: perhaps repetition of phrases, an unusual pause, or talking over you. That may suggest that the chillingly familiar voice one hears is a pre-recorded fake.
Creating a safe word that only family members know is a foolproof safeguard, says Levin. Ask the apparent victim to recite the word or phrase – if they can’t, it’s a con.
Above all else, do not buy into the hysteria.
‘Scammers always operate on a theory of panic,’ cautions Levin, ‘Keep calm.’
Although – that is always easier said than done.
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