In recent years, kidnappings of this type were reported in 2018 and 2021 alone, but there were only 21 between the two years
The State Attorney General’s Office announced that at least 27 people in Coahuila have been victims of virtual kidnapping, this in the first eight months of 2024.
According to information recorded by the State Attorney General’s Office, among the victims are 22 men and five women, who between January and August of this year suffered the situation after answering a phone call.
Virtual kidnapping is one of the criminal forms that has become popular for at least 10 years. It has become beneficial for criminal groups and individual criminals, since the perpetrator never has physical contact with the victim, making the activity less risky as they are not fully identified.
The Ministry of the Interior details in its stipulation on this crime that, in order to commit virtual kidnapping, the criminals manage to get in touch with the victim and, through threatening words, get him to leave his home, while extracting information about the victim’s family.
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“They threaten to harm a family member if their instructions are not followed. Later, they ask the victim to turn off their cell phone and go to a specific place (usually hotels), where they call them to give them new instructions,” defines the Ministry of the Interior.
“During the time in which the person is incommunicado, the criminals make calls to the family members claiming the alleged kidnapping with the objective of obtaining the payment of a ransom,” describes the federal agency.
According to the data presented by the Prosecutor’s Office, although the country’s youth have had a greater approach to information related to virtual kidnapping, the victims that have been registered in 2024 are between 16 and 37 years old.
During the previous years, the Prosecutor’s Office had not reported this type of cases, and on the last occasions, it was five years ago, in 2018, when it announced that 10 had been registered, as well as in 2021 another 11 incidents of this type, so that by 2024, the crime almost triples.
At the national level, various media outlets have documented that this type of criminal acts have been carried out from prisons where criminals manage to obtain cell phones from which they commit the crime against people at liberty.
The way in which the perpetration of all these incidents coincides is that it comes from unknown phones, which is why both federal and state authorities have made constant calls not to respond to these lines.
Source: vanguardia
