This is, obviously, not a “need answer fast” question.
One tactic apparently employed by some families who have had loved ones kidnapped is that they demand to speak to the kidnapped person over the phone, “Or else we’ll assume he/she isn’t alive and you’re faking it.” This tactic is apparently especially common in Asia, where some scammers have been known to fake abductions over the phone (“Hey, we have your kid, and you must pay $$$ within the next few hours”) when the kid is, in fact, not home.
Does this…increase or decrease the risk to the abductee?
I’m fascinated by kidnappings so I’ve read a lot of case histories. ISTM, there are so many varied reasons and types of kidnappers that it would be difficult to predict.
That being said, if a kidnappers goal is money, proof of life seems a small price to pay to ensure the ransom is paid. I don’t see the upside of killing the hostage just because it’s asked.
Kidnappers, in general, are stupid. Kidnapping should be easy to get away with… but it rarely happens.
I’m in the middle of a Mike Omer book written from the point of view of a negotiator facing the kidnapping of a child, and it goes into so much detail on strategy that I’m assuming he did some research and wants to use it.
One of the things the narrator talks about is framing interactions with kidnappers as open-ended questions, rather than as demands. So in the case of looking for proof, you would never demand it, instead you would ask the more vague “how do I know he’s alive?” The main point is to the extent possible letting the kidnappers feel like they are in control, rather than trying to force them into a behavior/backing them into a corner.
ISTM another advantage of paying money for ransom is that there is no way for the kidnapper(s) to collect the money without risking capture in some way.
If a bank transfer, someone’s account has to be on the receiving end. If a bag of cash, cops can stake out and watch that drop site. No matter what the method may be, there’s no safe way for the abductors to collect the $$$.
I thought cryptocurrency was supposed to solve this “problem”. Maybe kidnappers aren’t tech-savvy enough for this yet, but that’s been the route that malware hijackers tend to go these days.
It would seem to me that the likelihood that the ransom would be contingent on proof of life would also provide an incentive for the kidnappers to keep the victim alive.
The tech-savvy ones certainly wouldn’t ask for bitcoins. That’d be like saying “I want the ransom all in hundred-dollar bills, with sequential serial numbers, and a fluorescent orange dot on each one”.
I agree that in reality, trying to use cryptocurrency as a way to remain anonymous is an absolutely utter failure unless you have a good exit strategy. It definitely is possible to trace where the cryptocurrency goes when it’s sent, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to track down the person to whom it was initially sent. All you need is someone that lives out of reach of the law enforcement (like North Korea) that would be tracing the money, and has no obligation to such law enforcement to provide the details of who it was that gave them the cryptocurrency as the blockchain shows it was. I assume that hackers part of a organized criminal group have this sort of network available to them, to launder the cryptocurrency in a way such that you might know where it went through, but you have no means of determining who those people actually are - just what wallet addresses they used. Random kidnappers definitely don’t have this network available to them.
“You want a toe? I can get you a toe. Hell I can get you a toe by 3 o’clock this afternoon, with nail polish.”
It is going to depend upon where in the world you are at. In some countries kidnapping is a cottage industry where when you pay the ransom, the person is freed. These are countries without integrated law enforcement and with some cooperative corruption where the kidnapers are unlikely to get caught.
In other places the victims are already dead because they may have clues to the perpetrators. Hollywood loves to make movies about kidnapping. But the reality is which kind is this? In a first world country it doesn’t work often, they are going to get caught, and the person is likely to be already dead.
But most child kidnappings, about 99%, are done by family members for custodial reasons. All those missing kids on milk cartons in the '70s were mostly custodial in nature.
Here’s the Straight Dope article on it from about 20 years ago. Saying that most missing kids are family kidnappings is probably wrong - runaways are actually the largest number in that study, followed by kids who got lost. But that study does say that kidnapping by a non-custodial parent is much larger than kidnapping by a stranger. Cecil questions the statistics in the article however.