Telephone extortion - modalities

1.- Basically and colloquially, it consists of the pressure that is exerted—mostly—by telephone on someone through threats or other tricks, to force them to act in a certain way and thus obtain money or another benefit. There are different modalities:

2.- Direct extortion: It takes place when a subject contacts the victim personally and, in his presence, shows him photos of his family, taken precisely that day in the morning when he was being fired at the door of his house. The criminal claims to have kidnapped his relatives through accomplices and demands that he give him a sum of money, otherwise he will harm them.

3.- Indirect extortion: occurs when the victim receives a call or written messages demanding a certain amount of money in exchange for not harming him or his family.

4.- Special requests: The victim is required by telephone to deposit a certain amount of money in a solitary place, expressly mentioning that, if they are detained, the family will suffer the consequences.

5.- Modalities: kidnapped family member, injured family member, detained family member, winner of an alleged contest, etc. Then, through deception and threats, criminals force victims to pay a ransom; They also threaten to harm the party(ies) if they call the police or alert authorities.

6.- Most schemes or modus operandis use various techniques to instill a sense of fear, panic and urgency in an effort to rush the victim to make a quick decision. The instructions generally require that the ransom payment be made immediately and usually by bank transfer. These schemes involve varying amounts of ransom demands, often diminishing at the first indication of resistance.

7.- Criminals often go to great lengths to engage victims in ongoing conversations to prevent them from verifying the status and location of people allegedly “kidnapped,” “accidented,” or “detained.” Callers often make their victims believe that they are being watched and that they were personally attacked. In reality, the perpetrators are simply making hundreds of calls, possibly using telephone directories or other telephone lists or data provided, for example, by hackers.

8.- The advent of AI (artificial intelligence), the cunning of the scammers and the complexity of the maneuvers mean that we must be very attentive. Today, with the training of AI models, it is very easy to imitate voices and even generate fake videos of people.

9.- The aforementioned schemes and others that are on the rise come mostly—although not exclusively—from inside prisons.

Telephone extortion preventive measures ►

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