By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Feb 27 2007 (IPS)

When the voice on the telephone threatened to kill her daughter, the 83-year-old Brazilian did not hesitate. “Ok, kill her, but kill her good and dead, because then you’ll go to hell, which is where those who do this to a mother belong,” she shouted.

The collect call to her home in São Paulo began with a woman’s voice in tears saying “Mother, I’m being robbed.” The domestic, who answered the phone, passed it to Doña Tereza *.

After listening, Doña Tereza asked which daughter it was, naming only two of them.

“It’s Inés, mother,” said the desperate woman, who was immediately replaced on the telephone by the voice of a man who said she was being kidnapped. “If you don’t pay up, we’ll kill her,” he threatened. But since Inés was not even in the country at the time, Doña Tereza told the supposed kidnapper to go to hell.

Her reaction was not only a result of the mistake committed by the people posing as kidnappers. It was also a result of experience. Doña Tereza had already undergone something similar in 2006, when she was living in Río de Janeiro with another of her daughters.

On that occasion, the call began by informing her that her daughter had had an accident and was in the hospital. At the time, her daughter did happen to be out, visiting some friends.

When he then changed tack and said it was a kidnapping, threatening to kill her daughter, Doña Tereza had no problem telling him off.

The two frustrated attempts at obtaining ransom, one in Río de Janeiro and another in São Paulo in less than a year, reflect to what extent the phone kidnapping scam has become an epidemic in Brazil.

The military police centre of operations in São Paulo received 3,150 reports of fake kidnapping attempts in the first 45 days of the year alone, the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo recently reported. And that is only one small part of the total number of cases, the majority of which are never reported.

Many people have already heard of the scam and do not fall for it, responding with sarcasm to the threats received over the phone.

But the large number of real kidnappings in Brazil gives some credibility to the threats. A significant number of people end up paying the ransom, and do not call the police.

Mércia Mendes de Barros, a 67-year-old retiree in São Paulo, recently died of a heart attack when she was told over the phone that her son had been kidnapped. By the time one of her neighbours managed to reach her son on his cell-phone, and found out that he had not been kidnapped, Mendes de Barros was already dead.

A large part of the phone calls come from inside the country’s prisons and are collect calls. The police have advised people not to accept these calls unless they know the person who is calling.

In public interest messages aired on the local media, the police also recommend that people keep track of where their loved ones are at all times, that they not put up plaques outside their homes advertising their professions, and that they avoid supplying personal details, such as phone numbers or the names of restaurants or other locales that they frequent.

But despite the awareness-raising campaign, many of the victims end up accepting the terms outlined by the supposed kidnappers, who generally ask for a few thousand reals (one real 47 cents of a dollar) – small sums compared to the huge ransom payments normally demanded by kidnappers. The idea is to demand an amount of money that is readily available to the victim, in order to complete the transaction quickly.

The majority of the families targeted are chosen at random. The “kidnappers” do not actually have information about the family they are calling, and merely try to startle the person answering the phone into giving information away, by saying, for example, “What’s wrong, Joao?” thus giving the scam artist the name of his supposed victim.

If the strategy fails, the faux kidnappers simply move on to the next number in the telephone directory.

But other cases are more sophisticated, and involve a certain amount of preparation. Inés herself, Doña Tereza’s daughter, was asked to pay ransom for the driver of the company that she runs, who was supposedly kidnapped.

The perpetrators had names and phone numbers from the company, and the call was made to her home number, which is what made Inés believe the kidnapping may be real and decide to negotiate.

After she insisted that she did not have on hand the amount of money demanded in ransom, which the “kidnappers” had already reduced from 5,000 to 3,000 reals (2,350 to 1,410 dollars), she was told to call a telephone number in Río de Janeiro.

Inés, who lives in São Paulo, then called the police, who instructed her not to do anything, and especially not to call the number she had been given, which would allow the perpetrators to “clone” her cell-phone and use it in other crimes.

But the scam, which appears to have begun in the last few years, does not only involve staging phony kidnappings.

Three years ago, before there was any public talk of the phenomenon, a foreign journalist received threats over the phone that her house would be attacked.

The man on the other end of the line knew her address and was familiar with her daily routine, and demanded payment of a certain amount of money if she wanted to avoid an attack.

Although he did not achieve his goal, and ended up in prison, the journalist was forced to move to another neighbourhood.

Before the fake phone kidnappings became popular, prisoners would threaten or scam people into buying pre-paid minutes for cell-phones and passing them the codes. The aim was for the inmates to keep their cell-phones working so they could continue to communicate with the outside world.

The Brazilian public has long been demanding that cell-phones be kept out of the hands of prisoners, many of whom use them to commit crimes and run scams and crime rings from behind bars.

But mobile phones continue to be smuggled in, and telephone companies do not block the signals because it would also affect those living in the areas surrounding the prisons.

* The names have been changed to protect the victims from reprisals.

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