By: Christopher Kinney

Hackers that have been extorting unexpecting victims out of millions of dollars by fabricating stories and convincing them to wire money have become increasingly sophisticated in their methods.  Specifically, the new scam is to trick parents into believing that their children have been kidnapped and need money for release.  This phenomenon is called “Virtual Kidnapping” and it has lawmakers and law enforcement agencies worried.

Virtual kidnapping occurs most commonly over the phone but has increased exponentially since the dawn of the internet.  The internet allowed scammers access to more platforms to target their victims and has also led to increasingly sophisticated extortion methods that make it harder to decipher real emergencies from scams.  Scammers typically play a recording of a young girl screaming and begging for help from her parents.  Before parents can even realize that the voice they hear is not their own daughter, they panic, oftentimes saying the name of their child, which gives the hackers all the information they need for leverage.  The hackers take advantage of this emotional state and have successfully extorted parents out of millions.  Unfortunately for parents, there is little they can do to trace their money after it has been wired, forcing them to rely on the good faith of their banks if they hope to see their money again.

Law enforcement initially scoffed at the idea of virtual kidnapping when the crime first began to occur across the country.  It was seen as a local issue and did not receive attention from federal agencies for nearly two decades.  Police departments did not take the threats seriously and blamed the victims for falling for a trick they likened to the “Nigerian prince” emails that continue to scam Americans out of nearly $700,000 a year.

More recently, however, law enforcement has started to take the issue of virtual kidnapping more seriously.  This is largely due to the uptick in frequency of attacks of this nature and the substantial difficulty of remedying the financial and emotional injuries caused.  The FBI has reported that virtual kidnapping is responsible for the third most victims of all internet scams, with only phishing and fake sales calls credited with more.  Virtual kidnapping has the FBI particularly worried because it leads to highly emotional reactions, which is incredibly hard to prevent through traditional educational methods.  The FBI also lacks the manpower to track so many phone calls and small money wires coming from so many directions at once.  For now, the FBI has asked individuals to be on high alert and has posted this message on their website:

To help prevent virtual kidnapping scams:

• Never post news of upcoming travel dates and locations online.
• Discuss virtual kidnapping with family members prior to any travel.
• Have a “password” that family members can ask for in an emergency to confirm that a loved one is really in trouble.
• Be wary of providing financial information to strangers over the phone.

Hallmarks of a virtual kidnapping include:

• The calls may not come from the kidnapped target’s phone.
• Callers go to great lengths to keep victims on the phone.
• Callers are usually unable to answer simple questions about targets such as what they look like.
• Ransom money is only accepted via a wire transfer service.
• Callers request that the ransom funds be wired to multiple people in several small amounts.

We must do more to help prevent situations like this from becoming commonplace in the years to come.  Currently, because the majority of the internet scams involve wire transactions that cross state lines, the perpetrators are charged with wire fraud.  It is time that this type of criminal activity is addressed more directly, with charges that fit.  In 2005, Congress almost passed a sweeping Anti-Phishing Act that would likely have addressed crimes of this nature head-on.  Currently, there is very little risk involved for “virtual kidnappers” unless they are caught after successfully tricking a family into wiring them thousands of dollars.  Without anything to deter individuals from dialing, this issue is likely to continue.  This week alone I have received 7 phone calls from numbers that Apple has deemed “likely a scam”.  The conversation around a national anti-phishing needs to resurface if there is any hope for this problem to disappear.

 

Student Bio: Christopher Kinney is a second-year law student at Suffolk University Law School. He is a staffer on the Journal of High Technology Law. Prior to law school, Christopher received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in History from Boston College and spent several years working for one of the largest technology providers in the United States.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the views of the author alone and do not represent the views of JHTL or Suffolk University Law School.