The gangs have become more sophisticated, increasingly its techniques of kidnapping. The new ‘fashion’ is to manipulate the victims to get hold of themselves

In a great cartwheel space/temporary, dozens of phones began to ring in 2015 along the A-6 highway to La Coruña, just outside of Madrid.

Ring, Ring. Majadahonda, Las Rozas, Pozuelo, even. Like a wildfire, like ivy growing at its ball, the phones began to ring. The descolgaban mothers, grandmothers, gentlemen, the inevitable maid.

on The other side waiting for them a unique work of theater, hiperrápida and acento latino. “We have your grandson”. “We have your son.” “Send us X money in X minutes or will not see.” “Run, run LET’s KILL him”. “We KILL IT: pay”.

there Were those who ran. I listened to your grandson/granddaughter on the other side of the phone- “it’s true that it seemed he!”-, had to send through the internet a few thousand euros and 15 minutes later, in his right mind, he asked: “But what the hell have I done”.

there Was one who hung up the phone and shrugged his shoulders: “what My son? But if my son is here at my side. Come here, Johnny”.

And there were some who began to pull the thread. And the threads almost all the calls (I have here the somersault) were, as explained in the Guardia Civil, to the same site. About 11,000 km of the A-6. In Chile.

In particular, to a huge building located half an hour from Santiago, in the Metropolitan region: the prison Hill II, one of the penalties more tremebundos of Latin america (the fifth, according to some rankings are newsworthy). Some 2,500 prisoners, grazed by just 80 gendarmes -as there will be call-, make your layer a sayo in terms of stabbings, rows and slopes (and if they choose not to be granted to themselves the liberty is probably because there are warm).

“Among these people, as we investigate, we ran the voice of that on the highway of La Coruña people lived with dough” feature on the Unit Operational Central of the Guardia Civil. “So, just like in that prison seem to have mobile and a lot of time, threw the evening by calling The Gardens, pulling cane, to see who wanted it. And there were those who wanted it, of course, there always is. Sometimes called number correlatives, picked up the guide and palante”.

Members of the UCO displaced to Mexico, with the kidnapping victim of Querétaro. GUARDIA CIVIL

once you get to the new hotel, the phone rings from the bedside table: ‘If you leave the room or if you hang up the phone, you’re dead’

Spain was being baptized in the proceloso world of hijacking, virtual, that for the past 10 years, governing Latin america (with the rise of the mobile phone), and now, after you achieved to stop the first onslaught of the years 2015/2016, will sofisticándose.

To the point, for example, of the use of social networks to study the victim and find the slit appropriate: “Have come to attack the family of a person who rose to Facebook a ticket to the Riviera Maya”, feature in the Section of Kidnappings, Homicios and Shakedowns of the UCO, which also resolved the deaths of Diana Quer, Gabriel Cross and the family of Pioz. “Went up the ticket and they took note of the hours in that I was going to be flying, and therefore incommunicado. There were fry to your family. Are learning and are being increasingly used all of the information that the citizen is leaving in the internet, which unfortunately is a lot. Too much”.

it Is one of the latest mutations of a pest that, for the Civil Guard, “there is no way to stop it if it is not with prevention”: the study of networks. Example: on the 9th of last march were received in the town of segovia to Navas de Oro (1.360 inhabitants) at least six phone calls to landlines in many homes.

on The other side of the cable, a woman with an accent apparently colombian screamed between sobs of a child. The victims, all of them elderly people in a modus operandi that suggests a previous study, listening to the woman narrating a nightmare: she had kidnapped his grandson/granddaughter, but ended up having an accident in the car in which they were traveling and needed help. But urgent help: ALREADY.

The difficulty to digest such a surprise (rapture-accident-etc.) did not prevent the six elders to circumvent the danger. Or distrusted, or sometimes the woman is not guessed right with the name of the grandson, but the situation made clear the ability of the baddies to study an environment thanks to the on-line data (internet, excellent big data for this kind of scams).

when you get alone to yourself

But for the crime, they say in the UCO, nothing better than turning the victim into the author of the crime, in a neat loop that moves our days, a figure very of the Cold War: the agent unconscious. The person that, unknowingly, believe that you are doing what is dictated by their will, but in reality is a puppet in the hands of another.

Welcome to the abduction of mind. Secuéstrese yourself.

Queretaro, Mexico, October 2014. A businessman, Catalan, sits in his hotel when he receives a call on the landline from your room. A day later, the mexican Police will freed, in an operation sparkling, in a hotel of San Juan River, 54 kilometres from Querétaro. The agents were prepared for an inevitable shooting, but there was no one.

somehow, the man had kidnapped himself.

“When you pick up the phone in Queretaro, you say he talks to the Police, they are going to do an operation against drugs in the hotel in which he is, right in that same plant, and that they are securing to all the people that are there so that there are no collateral victims”, they have in the UCO. “Tell him that you pick up your things quickly, you have to be very agile, so as not to arouse suspicions, and out, take a car and go to another hotel in which the Government has sought a room. Give the address and explain how to get there”.

The man climbs into his rental car, and in effect makes those 54 kilometers, without knowing that it is he, himself, getting into the mouth of the wolf with a trick, phones aside, it is more old that the thymus of the picture. “Once you get to the new hotel, which verifies that it is true that there is a room reserved for the name that you say, it sounds again on the phone from the bedside table: ‘If you leave the room or if you hang up the phone, you’re dead.’ The man is left hanging on the phone fixed and will override the mobile”.

taking Advantage of this situation of isolation, self-inflicted, the kidnappers contact the family and ask for a ransom of a million dollars, 60,000 euros to change. The family presents complaint in Mollet del Valles. The kidnappers say they are part of the Zetas cartel, and that or money or descuartizan. The UNIVERSITY sends a team to Mexico and from there to the kafkaesque outcome: there was no kidnapping, just a charade.

Months after occurs in Monterrey a variant. A Spanish entrepreneur in the ceramics sector receives a call to his hotel room: he is called, this time, a sort of paramilitary police drug mexican. Distrust of foreigners, they are going to do a raid on his hotel, and if you are a drug “you’re going to strip, beat and stick a bullet in the head”, quickie and by that order.

Force the entrepreneur, whether through their own mobile and therefore chained to him, to go down to a shop in front of the hotel and recharge for 14 phone lines whose numbers will dictate, and also to buy a prepaid mobile and disable one of his own, always with very precise directives that will terrorize the victim.

Then he was taken to the new hotel, in which there was a room waiting for you to name “Matel”, and where we remained a few hours under tremendous threats -serrarle fingers, hitting shots in the head: the key to it all is the conviction on those threats-until the agents managed to contact him via whatsapp and make her see that, in reality, in the background, everything had the consistency of a macabre prank call: as when, as a teenager, we used to call a phone number at random, asking for the Doctor Frog or similar, but the donkey.

Less laughter

“Yes, seems to be a thing of laughter, but it happens a lot more than we think”, say in the Section of the Kidnapping of the UCO: “We have clear that for every case reported, there are many more that do not, because people are embarrassed to admit that they have played. Prefer to lose a few thousands of euros, because bailouts tend to be amounts that are low, before the self-esteem. No one likes to do the ridiculous”.

Latin america, it has already been said, is the mecca of the mode to ends worthy of a picturesque quality, let’s say, very Latin america: the colombian Government, explained to the Civil Guard arrived to remove the posts of telephony around the environment in any prison of the country as the only way to hack away at the problem, losing thereby in the courts, lawsuits against citizens who were living round about the presidio -“have a serious problem with the control of mobile phones in prisons”-.

however, they have in the UCO, the complexity of the abduction of mind is still more ocean to the light of a fact: beset by fear, victims of the method of the uncle-uncle, as it is called in Colombia, some “have come to pay a ransom for a nephew… When they didn’t even have nieces and nephews”.

Information and prevention, the only weapons

Despite the fact that the Latin american countries, major ‘exporters’ of kidnappings virtual, are putting limits like, for example, include a speech prior to all calls that are received of specific areas that have prisons -and therefore potential ‘producers’ of this scam, the Guardia Civil estimates that the trail is unstoppable and is only attackable with prevention: with the fact that these practices are known, and their potential victims are prevented possible with respect to the attempts that may occur.

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