17-year-old Chinese student Kai Zhuang was found “very scared and suffering from hypothermia”, but alive, in a tent in a rural area of Utah, US, where he was on an exchange, after his parents were told $80,000 extorted in what was described as a 'cyber kidnapping', a practice that affects foreign students in the USA and which consists of convincing young people to isolate themselves and take selfies as if they were prisoners. The victims are then held under remote control via Facetime or Skype and convinced, together with their families, that they will be hit if a ransom is not paid.
The kidnappers reportedly began keeping tabs on Kai as early as December 20, when he was seen by police officers with camping gear in Provo, Utah.
The officers had proposed, to no avail, to take him back to the family where he lived in Riversale. On December 28, the school he attended called the police, alerted by parents in China who had received a ransom demand. His son, he was told, had been kidnapped. The location of his kidnapping was just 40 kilometers from Riversdale. There was no heating in his tent and he had limited amounts of food and water available. A sleeping bag and several phones used by the kidnappers to keep him under control. After being freed, Kai asked for a hot cheeseburger and to talk to his family.
#Cyber #kidnapping #year #Chinese #boy #USA #ransom #thousand #dollars
