Gizmodo Australia » kidnapping

Nutter Holds Victim With Sega Light Phaser for 10 Hours

Jesus Diaz — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:40:00 +0000

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.

According to Brazilian new site Globo, the man invaded a house in Samambaia, a city near Brazil’s capital Brazilia, to get them to pay a debt of 42 reales ($US111). However, instead of breaking their legs with a baseball bat, the guy tried to pew-pew them with a Sega Light Phaser, which if funny until you see the two kitchen knives he was also carrying with him.

After ten hours of negotiation, the man liberated the woman. According to the police, the man had previous charges for killing and drug abuse, which explains the use of the Light Phaser. [Kotaku]

Mexico Fingerprinting Mobile Phone Users to Crack Down on Kidnapping

Sean Fallon — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:40:00 +0000

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.

Starting in April, anyone purchasing a phone in Mexico will be fingerprinted and their call logs, text and voice messages will be archived for a year. These seem like strict measures, but hundreds of tourists are kidnapped in Mexico each year and the problem is getting worse. In fact, some believe these measures don’t go far enough:

Billionaire Carlos Slim, who controls Mexico’s No. 1 cell phone operator America Movil, said the law would be more useful if it tracked the movements of cell phone users. “What needs to be done is another type of more effective measures.”

Either way, will these steps do much to prevent you from being nabbed while visiting on Spring break? I doubt it. Mexico’s corrupt bureaucracy is legendary. At most it would amount to a minor obstacle that could be easily remedied with a little extra cash. [Yahoo Tech]

Mexico’s Rich Embedding GPS-Assisted RFID Tags Under Their Skin In Case of Kidnapping

John Mahoney — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:50:00 +0000

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?

Yeah, so long as you’re kidnapped while wearing your GPS transmitter fanny pack (and your attackers don’t mind you keeping it), you’ll be fine. I guess it might make sense if you’re going to be alone in a seedy neighbourhood late at night to go ahead and strap up, but still, at this price, it seems like Xega (who seem to be ~~mysteriously without a website~~ yes, here it is, thanks guys, it’s Friday) is just capitalising on people’s fears with a bogus safety net. And successfully, too–the company claims they’ve sold the service to over 2,000 people. [Reuters, Image: Amal Graafstra's OG RFID implants]

Kid Arranges Own Abduction Because Parents Won’t Buy A Wii

Matt Hickey — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 03:30:48 +0000

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]