January 2, 2007
Phone extortion coming from behind bars in Mexico
Mexico's fastest growing crime racket is being run out of the big house, reports Chron.com.
All an inmate needs is a cell phone — smuggled in with a reported $5,000 bribe to guards — and a list of potential victims. The criminals call at random, and the message rarely varies: "Hello, we've kidnapped your son. Pay up, or you will never see him again."
In a country ranked among the top kidnapping havens in the world, such threats are chillingly effective and skyrocketing — from eight reported telephone extortions in 2001 to 3,753 in 2005 — according to the Federal Investigative Agency. The agency, Mexico's equivalent of the FBI, had registered another 1,647 complaints nationwide by mid-September. Experts say the real number of extortions is probably 10 times as high, because most crimes go unreported in Mexico.
The Agency estimates that 80 percent of the calls are made from inside prisons, often by experienced kidnappers who continue to ply their trade from behind bars.
Ransoms range from $50 to tens of thousands of dollars, experts say. Victims pay either by depositing money in specified bank accounts or buying cell phone cards and providing the callers with the access codes. The callers then use those cards to continue the extortion.
Last year, telephone companies began putting messages on all calls made from public phones inside prisons, alerting recipients of their origin. Prison authorities have also tried blocking cell phone service in prisons. But those efforts have largely failed, partly because neighbors have complained about losing their own service, said criminal lawyer Oscar Tukumaga.
Related stories:
-- Mexico's Prisons Are Home to Drug Lords
-- Cons continue to run rackets by cell phones.
-- More inmate-cellphone stories in textually.
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