THE phone call begins with the cries of an anguished child calling for a parent: "Mama! Papa!" The youngster's sobs are quickly replaced by a husky male voice that means business.
"We've got your child," he says in rapid-fire Spanish, usually adding an expletive for effect, and then rattling off a list of demands that might include cash or jewels dropped off at a certain street corner or a large deposit made to a local bank.
The twist is that little Pablo or Teresa is safe and sound at school, not duct-taped to a chair or stuffed in the back of a pirate taxi. But when the mobile phone call comes in, that is not at all clear.
This is "virtual kidnapping", the name being given to Mexico's latest crime craze – one that has capitalised on the raw nerves of a country that has been terrorised by the real thing for years.
"This reflects the fear in Mexican society, the collective psychosis about kidnapping," said Adrienne Bard, an American radio journalist who has lived in Mexico for more than 20 years and who received a call in March from a crying young woman. Shocked, she thought it was her own college-age daughter. "I totally fell into the trap," she said.
So have many others. A hot line set up to deal with the problem of kidnappings in which no one is actually kidnapped received more than 30,000 complaints from last December to the end of February. According to Joel Ortega, Mexico City's police chief, there have been eight arrests and 3,415 telephone numbers have been identified as those used by extortionists.
But identifying the phone numbers – they are now listed on a government website – has done little to slow the extortion calls. Nearly all the calls are from mobile phones, most of them stolen, say authorities.
Of the relatively few arrests made so far, three suspects were brothers, aged 19, 31 and 34, who were caught collecting money from a victim. The two younger brothers blamed their older sibling, who had been in and out of prison for years, for putting them up to it.
Last November, more than a dozen members of Mexico's Congress received calls saying that their children had been taken, prompting the legislature to suspend business for the day.
An investigation indicated the lawmakers were probably not specifically targeted, but had been dialled on the same day because their phone numbers were consecutive.
Still, the fear that gripped the chamber was real. Security was tightened, and one lawmaker, Mirna Rincón of the governing National Action Party, collapsed in her chair when she received the call saying her son had been grabbed.
As Graciela Villarreal, a Mexico City psychologist, said recently in an interview in the newspaper El Universal, those who receive the calls, whether the voice of the child sounds right or not, are left thinking: "What if it is my child?"
She said some victims experience a form of Stockholm syndrome, actively co-operating with the criminal on the other end of the line and even disclosing valuables they could turn over, just in case it is not a scam.
Bard found herself filling a bag with valuables — just as the man ordered. He wanted jewellery, particularly gold, and was disappointed when she told him that she had a Timex watch, not a Rolex.
He also told her the money she collected did not have to be in pesos. He would accept dollars and euros, as well. "When I picked up the phone, a girl was yelling: 'Mama!'" Bard said. "I thought it was my daughter, and I was telling her to calm down. All she said was: 'Mama! Mama! They have me!'"
Eventually her husband tracked down their daughter safe and sound in class at a local university. No money changed hands in her case, but in many instances – as many as a third of the calls, one study showed – the criminals make off with some valuables. One estimate put the take from telephone scams in Mexico in the last six months at 186.6 million pesos (£9m).
"You feel terror," Bard said. "If you think there's any chance that it's your child, you play along."
The full article contains 717 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
