Posted on 01/01/2024 8:49:00 PM PST by nickcarraway
A 17-year-old foreign exchange student reported missing last week was found safe on Sunday after “cyber kidnappers” extorted $80,000 from his family in China.
Riverdale police said Kai Zhuang was “manipulated and controlled” by “cyber kidnappers” who led him to believe that his family was threatened, KSL reported. The family paid the money after the “kidnappers” sent “continuous threats,” including a photograph that made it appear the boy “was being held captive and in danger.”
A detective found him on Sunday in the mountains near Brigham City, where he was “alive but very cole and scared.” Riverdale police said they believe he had been “self-isolating” in a canyon near Brigham City.
Detectives at Kai’s remote campsite/Riverdale Police Department
Police launched a search for the boy after his family reported receiving a ransom note and the photo. Initially reports said only that he was possibly being held against his will, as CrimeOnline reported.
But the FBI told police they had worked several recent cases in which “cyber kidnappers” target Chinese foreign exchange students by telling the students to isolate themselves and take photos that make it look like they’re being held captive, which they’re told to send to their families, KSL said.
Riverdale police tracked Kai’s bank records and purchases over the last month as well as tracking his phone records and discovered a recent encounter with police in Provo when he was discovered trying to set up a campsite.
On Sunday, detectives tracked him to his remote campsite outside Brigham City.
“The victim was relieved to see police” Riverdale Police Chief Casey Warren said. “The victim had no heat source inside the tent, only a heat blanket, a sleeping bag, limited food and water and several phones that were presumed to be used to carry out the cyber kidnapping.”
I’m glad the border is secure from Chinese “dreamers” coming in to kidnap others and extort money. Thanks Biden.
Sounds like the kids may be blackmailing the parents....
If you are going to kidnap yourself, at least be prepared for the environment you choose.
He's lucky they found him in time. He was half way to being cole slaw.
If the cops carried the kid out of there would that make them cole porters?
That’s excellent. But I wonder just how many FReepers know who he was. We are losing so much of our culture on a daily basis now.
This wasn’t a “cyber” kidnapping.
It was, if as reported, a plain, old kidnapping with the ransom demand conveyed via modern communications.
I worked for ICE in 2012-2014. I used to see all the case files for the “detainees”. Every now and then I would pick up a thick one and take a look.
The worst case I saw was a Chinaman who had just gotten released from a 20-year stint for kidnapping in a federal prison and now we had him for deportation. He was involved with a kidnapping ring around NYC.
The ring would grab young Chinese national students and hold them in the basement of a house. They would then contact their families in China and demand payment for their safe release. The students were chained up in the basement. They would send pics of them back to the families.
The ring was busted, a couple of the students were found murdered in the house. This guy didn’t get any of the murders pinned on him, only the kidnapping charge.
As I said he came to us to be deported. We could only legally hold him for 270 days after his release from prison. Normally, we would have had him escorted to a plane with an escort with him on the plane back to China quite well short of the 270-day limit.
Here’s the funny part, China would not guarantee that they would not execute him (most likely as soon as he deboarded the plane in China, right on the tarmac). Sooooo you can’t deport a guy to a nation that’s probably going to kill him, any nation that would do that. Against the “rules”.
Sooooo...last I knew we were holding on to him for the full 270 days, as long as we legally could, and he was going to be released from custody in the SF Bay area with some kind of electronic ankle monitoring device and would be required to report to the immigration office once a week.
I presume, when he got there, he cut off the monitoring device and headed into the Chinese gang underground, living and walking around next to American citizens somewhere or other.
Give me your ATM pin or the chin gets it. Just keep the account full of $$.
[“alive but very cole and scared.”]
That’s cool. He could have been cole and slawed.
Too bad he couldn’t have found a cabbage with a warm fireplace nearby.
He should have said, “Hey! Kimchi a break!”
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