A man recently kidnapped his employee – who happens to be his son-in-law – because he thought the guy stole $US245 worth of rings. He assaulted the younger man before finally setting him free in exchange for a neighbour’s Xbox 360. More »
Those Brazilians seem to have a problem with gaming and kidnapping. This time it was a crazy guy who used a Sega Light Phaser—from the good old Master System—to kidnap a woman for ten hours.
In an effort to prevent criminals from using prepaid mobile phones to extort money and negotiate kidnapping ransoms, Mexico is requiring that all mobile phone companies build up a database on their clients.
Mexico has a pretty serious kidnapping problem–so serious that there is now a market for a US$4,000 RFID implant procedure (plus a US$2,200 annual fee) that promises to help track victims down. The system uses an implanted capsule under the skin that talks to an external GPS transmitter that you’ll need to be kidnapped with in order to beam your location to the folks at Xega, who are selling the service. Anyone else see a gigantic hole in this setup?
This honestly sounds more like the plot of a Cheech and Chong movie than a news story, but apparently it’s true. In China, a kid named Yang was so upset that his parents wouldn’t buy him a Wii that he got together with a couple of shifty individuals and faked his own kidnapping. They then demand a ransom of about US$1,400 and were caught trying to withdraw it from an ATM. We’re assuming Yang would have had enough from his cut of the would-be payoff that he could get his own Wii without his parents help. How he’d explain why the first thing he wanted to do after being rescued was a trip to Best Buy we don’t know. [Destructoid]
