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March 21, 2022 08:45 pm

Criminals Are Staging a Devious New Kind of Kidnapping - and the FBI is Stumped.

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.

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