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PARK CITY — Park City Police were investigating Friday what they believed to be one of the first virtual kidnappings to happen in the state of Utah.
Capt. Phil Kirk said a family received calls on Aug. 12 from people who claimed to have kidnapped their 15-year-old son.
The unknown callers threatened to harm the boy if the family tried to contact him and if they did not pay a ransom, Kirk said.
“It totally traumatized the whole family,” Kirk said. “They were going to comply with the demands.”
The callers, Kirk explained, seemed to know things about the boy that led the family to believe he had been taken.
Police initially responded in large numbers – with as many as 20 to 30 officers working the case, according to Kirk.
Soon, however, detectives located the teenager and determined no real kidnapping had taken place.
“It really didn’t occur – the victim, who was 15-years-old, wasn’t actually taken by the perpetrators,” Kirk said.
While local police said it was something they hadn’t really encountered prior to this case, the FBI has issued warnings in recent years as the scam calls have cropped up in other states.
In many of those cases, investigators said the victims appeared to be recent immigrants.
The Park City family, Kirk said, had only been in Utah for two weeks after moving from Mexico.
Kirk cautioned all who may potentially receive the scam call to be careful what they post on social media.
“That’s where these kinds of individuals, these suspects, get a lot of personal information that can help mislead the victim’s family into believing they really do have the victim,” Kirk said.
Police and the FBI provided several potential indicators of virtual kidnappings, including multiple, successive calls from the perpetrators; incoming calls placed from an outside area code or from an area outside the country; callers going to great lengths to keep victims on the phone; callers attempting to prevent family members from contacting their supposedly abducted loved ones; and demands that the ransom be paid by wire transfer.
