I read a very interesting book a while back entitled The Kidnap Years by David Stout. It was about a spate of kidnappings for cash back in the Twenties and Thirties. It covered the Lindbergh kidnapping, of course. But it detailed about a dozen other similar crimes, some where the victim survives, and others where the victim doesn’t.
What the book did not explain is why is kidnapping for ransom a crime that is nearly extinct in America. Okay, kidnapping was made a federal offense, but since when does that deter crime? I find this really puzzling.
I’m pretty sure this was all about the FBI and the good thing that J. Edgar Hoover accomplished. The FBI had this as their central mission for decades, probably right up to 9/11.
I’ve read that kidnapping becomes a federal crime if the victim is taken across state lines. Because it’s a federal crime, the FBI gets on the case, and they’re a very good law enforcement organization.
Ultimately, kidnapping for money becomes so risky that even hardened profiteering criminals won’t do it. However parents who lost custody disputes, pedophiles and other rapists, stalkers, cultists, and terrorists will still commit such non-financially motivated crimes. People still get kidnapped for Social Security fraud (which is financially motivated) so it’s not like that crime has completely disappeared.
Has little to do with enforcement of laws and everything to do with controls on cash. Demand a briefcase full of notes (and the highest denomination available now is the $100 bill so it’s bulky AF to get a big chunk) and you’ll wait a good long time for your victim’s family bank to order it (because banks don’t KEEP a lot of cash on hand) then as soon as you try to spend any of it the serial numbers kick off an alarm and you get swarmed by feds. What good is cash you can’t spend?
Huh? I’ve never heard of this. Do they kill the victim, dispose of the body, and pretend to be that person?
I’ve heard of family or caretakers not reporting elderly deaths in order to keep the checks coming. Usually, they just stash the body away on the premises. Ewwwwww.
The first line of the wiki page on kidnapping says " kidnapping is the unlawful confinement of a person against their will, often including transportation/asportation*. The asportation and abduction element is typically but not necessarily conducted by means of force or fear"
From that, I’d say that taking (against their will) someone to a series of ATMs (to steal their money) would be covered under kidnapping.
*Clicking on asportation takes you to the wiki page for larceny
Agreed. The FBI is an extremely talented and well-financed police organization with a relatively narrow focus. It is a very bad financial proposition to commit a crime they care about. See also: bank robbery.
The money laundering rules, which increasingly apply internationally, make it more and more difficult to spend that briefcase of cash. Even structuring your payments into an account will get attention these days.
I think the FBI is a good answer. For other countries where kidnapping for ransom is still a thing, what else may be missing from their legal systems? Don’t other countries have something similar to the FBI? Perhaps rampant corruption in general allows kidnappings to persist as a way to get money, quick.
First, after the snatch, you have to keep the kidnapee secure for some time.
Second, you have to communicate. Modern electronics make that difficult to achieve covertly.
Third, and most problematic you have to collect the ransom. Even authors of fiction have problems with this, given the abilities of the law enforcement agencies.
Fourth, you have to launder the proceeds. You are probably wanted for murder by now as your victim knows too much about you.
It’s a balance of risk and reward and the former usually outweighs the latter.
My guess is that with the advent of technology, there is a plethora of ways to scam people these days (Craigslist, phishing, conning the elderly into thinking their relatives are in danger, Nigerian prince scam, just to name a few), where technology puts up a barrier of distance between the criminal and the victim, and lowers the risk of the criminal being caught by law enforcement. Also, the perpetrators may be in a different country, where laws against these scams are non-existent or enforcement is lax.
Those scams usually involve wire transfers or Zelle transfers, both of which are non-reversible once the recipient bank have accepted the orders. Boom, easy money in the criminal’s bank account with comparatively low effort and risk.
Another byproduct of technology is ransomware attacks, which typically demand the payment in cryptocurrency, bypassing the difficulties of moving large bundles of cash around.
All being said, the ways technology has enabled new scams has really skewed the risk-reward ratio that it’s really not worth it anymore to go to all the effort to kidnap someone and then have to watch your back for the FBI, when you can earn similar amounts through a keyboard and clicks of a mouse from the anonymity afforded by the Internet, and you can even program an automated bot to do it for you.
There’s a particularly heinous scam where people use lax conservatorship laws (and, some times, complicit judges) to get elderly people declared incompetent and placed into their care, then move them into elder care facilities and sell off their homes and property, and take their SS checks to “pay” for their stay at the facility. I don’t think these generally get prosecuted as kidnapping, though.
I am sure it’s mostly this. The nature of money is different now. A suitcase full of illicit cash is simply a gigantic headache now in a way it was not in 1930, but the same technology and information sharing that makes kidnapping for ransom harder makes other forms of theft easier.
Imagine, for a moment, that through criminal means you came into possession of $1,000,000 in cash. What do you do with it? You cannot simply take it to the bank. You cannot buy large ticket items with it. It needs to be laundered, and unless you know what you’re doing or know a Marty Byrde, that is a difficult and drawn out process. And it ain’t gonna be easy to get it in the first place.
I don’t know how many random individuals get hit by ransomware. I keep hearing about institutions getting hit (they have money that can be harvested and the hit is nastier). Their IT people can learn how to use cryptocurrency pretty easily if they don’t understand it in the first place.
A guy at work, who no longer works there, sold real estate on the side. He was using his work PC for the side line, and lost it to a ransomware attack.