Going after children: how criminals mimic kidnapping for ransom
A new method of telephone deception is gaining momentum - con artists imitate the kidnapping of a minor and demand a ransom from the parents. With the help of manipulation criminals force the child to leave home for a while and cut off communication with the whole world, and in the meantime attack the parents with threats. Disassembly of the criminal scheme with experts - in the material "Izvestia".
Double blow
Police in Krasnogorsk near Moscow opened a criminal case under articles on extortion and abduction of a minor after the appeal of local residents. A 50-year-old employee of the Pension Fund and his 38-year-old wife, an endocrinologist, turned to law enforcement officers: they were contacted by unknown persons and informed about the kidnapping of their 17-year-old daughter - the criminals demanded half a million rubles as ransom, otherwise they threatened to kill and abuse the teenager. The girl is a diligent student, positively characterized and could hardly deceive her relatives. Special units quickly joined the search and managed to find the girl - she was in a fast-food restaurant on Biryulevskaya Street in Moscow.
It turned out that the story of the kidnapping was staged by an unidentified group of persons: if the parents were slipped a legend of kidnapping, the teenager was brainwashed, pretending to be members of the special services.
The girl said that the day before her parents went to the police, she received a call from unknown persons who introduced themselves first as FSB officers and then as Central Bank employees, claiming that the bank cards she was using were used to make payments to finance the AFU. The deceivers claimed that her parents would now face criminal liability. The criminals, communicating on behalf of the Central Bank, said that to solve the issue it was necessary to hand over to them all the valuables in the house for some kind of declaration. Through a courier, the girl handed over to unidentified persons jewelry, the total value of which in ruble equivalent exceeded half a million.
The next day, the criminals contacted the girl again and offered to drive to pick up the declared property. On the instructions of the "specialists", the girl blocked her phone numbers and deleted the WhatsApp application (part of Meta, an organization recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation) from her mobile device. But before that, the attackers managed to gain access to the account and started calling from the girl's number to her relatives. The teenager was sent by cab to the food court to wait for a meeting with the courier. The girl sat there until the evening, until she was found by the police, who were seriously working on the version of kidnapping.
A game of hide and seek
This is not the first "kidnapping" of telephone extortionists with the imitation of child abduction. The criminal algorithm is already several years old. In 2023, using a similar legend, criminals deceived the parents of a nine-year-old girl from Salekhard. First they contacted the child and said that her mother and father had been in an accident and that money was urgently needed to save them. The girl searched the whole house, but found no money. Then the fraudsters ordered her to throw away her smartphone and get into the cab they had ordered for a trip to the village of Aksarka (50 kilometers from Salekhard).
At the same time, the extortionists began calling the child's mother and demanding 2 million rubles, threatening otherwise to kill her daughter. The girl's relatives contacted the police, and they quickly figured out which car the child had left in. The cab driver, whom the kidnappers used blindly, turned out to be a decent man and did not drop off the child alone in an unfamiliar area - the girl was safe with him all this time until the police arrived.
A similar case was recorded in the Tomsk region in mid-January. Fraudsters tricked a 13-year-old schoolgirl into leaving the house, while at the same time accomplices demanded 500 thousand rubles from her mother. The girl gave the criminals access to all her accounts in messengers. Curiously, the extortionists asked the child to stay in video contact with them all the time.
Police officers over the past three years have also encountered similar schemes of deception, where instead of children, fraudsters tricked elderly loved ones into hiding. The game of hide-and-seek organized by the criminals brought them from hundreds of thousands to several million rubles.
Expert opinion
This scheme is entirely based on social engineering and is widely exploited by fraudsters, the development director of the Solar AURA external digital threat monitoring center of Solar Group told Izvestia.
- Moreover, it is applied to minors, adults, and elderly people alike. As a rule, this scenario is used as an element of a more elaborate scheme in which the victim is first extorted money and then, when there is nothing left to extort, is forced to perform some actions. These can be both openly destructive variations, such as setting fire to a military recruitment center, and actions aimed at obtaining additional money: working as a courier to pick up a bag with money stolen from another person, or, as in this case, staging a kidnapping.
The victim is convinced that she must "lay low" and cut off all contact with the outside world for her own good, the expert explains the intent of the criminals. For a person who has fallen under the influence of fraudsters, they can order a cab, book a hotel and so on.
- In some cases, the victim is persuaded to turn off the phone and delete messenger accounts, which will later be taken over by the attackers," says Vurasko.
A variety of psychological pressure mechanisms are used. The most popular now is convincing the victim that she or her loved ones are in danger of being prosecuted for anti-Russian actions and financing terrorist structures.
The user agrees to any actions dictated by the scammers, not wanting to bring trouble on themselves and their loved ones, explains the Izvestia interlocutor.
How to protect yourself
- Naturally, minors in this case are an extremely vulnerable audience," says Alexander Vurasko. - And, unfortunately, it is not so easy to protect oneself from this type of social engineering. First of all, you need to explain to your child that it is absolutely not worth it to trust phone calls or messages in messengers. If you ignore the call or message, nothing terrible will happen.
According to him, there is no need to take any action at the request of the person calling.
- If you receive a call or message, you should contact your parents and law enforcement. And, of course, adults should build a trusting relationship with the child, so that in case of such a situation, he believes not the voice from the phone, but immediately told his parents about it. Telling children about such threats in school lessons about cyber-literacy will also help improve their cyber-literacy skills," the expert recommended.
Valentin Demin, a former MUR officer, notes that this kind of crime is directly related to leaks of personal information about citizens and their families.
- This episode shows how multifaceted and in fact dangerous are the crimes related to the illegal obtaining of information about people by intruders," the retired police officer tells Izvestia.
According to the former operative, criminals in such schemes get additional information from the teenager about where the parents work, and immediately adjust the scenario of actions to be able to get the maximum possible ransom within the framework of "kidnapping" for a few hours.
- To prevent such crimes, we need awareness-raising work with teenagers, which is clearly not at its best right now. It is necessary to go to schools and other educational institutions, to tell about the danger of telephone "divorce", - concluded the interlocutor.
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