2024-09-03
19 分钟As revelers celebrated the arrival of 2024, news was breaking about a very unusual rescue.
On New Year's Eve, authorities found a 17 year old student camping alone in the Utah snow.
Kai Zhuang, a foreign exchange student from China, had been missing from the home of his American host.
For three days there had been fears that he had been kidnapped, but the reality was far stranger.
The exchange student was told his family in China was in danger unless he I isolated himself away from society and law enforcement.
The shivering and terrified teenager had been groomed by online scammers for more than a month.
Eventually, they had ordered him into the wilderness in the middle of winter.
Otherwise, they said, his family back in China would be harmed.
It was all part of a plan to trick Kai's parents into believing he really had been kidnapped.
At that point, we learned that they had received a photograph from Kai from his phone, and it was a photograph where it made it appear as if he was being kidnapped or held captive.
After that, they subsequently started receiving phone calls from the alleged kidnapper demanding a ransom.
Riverdale Police Chief Casey Warren said kai's parents transferred $80,000 to the scammers, but in reality, their son had never been in any physical danger, except perhaps from frostbite.
We were able to communicate with the family and show them that there's been other cases from around the world and several within the United States, so they would cease contact with the kidnappers and stop sending money.
This type of crime has come to be known as virtual or cyber kidnapping.
Now, getting somebody to fake their own kidnapping is quite something.
But what makes it even more extraordinary is that in these cases, the victims believe the people who are telling them to do that are the police.
Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
I'm Elaine Chong and you're listening to the second part of our BBC trending investigation into scammers who pose as Chinese police.
In the first part, we heard how these fraudsters extort money from people in the Chinese diaspora by threatening to have them extradited to China on false criminal allegations.
Virtual kidnappings take things even further.