Watsonville police warning residents of kidnapping scams

There have been a dozen fake kidnapping cases in a Central Coast city since the beginning of this year, but no one actually ended up being taken.

Watsonville police said they are scams, many of them choreographed in Mexican jails

Investigators are calling this virtual kidnapping, where pretend kidnappers call random numbers and play the sound of someone screaming in the background to trick those answering into believing their family members have been snatched.

Watsonville resident Pedro still remembers the call he got a year ago. After hearing screams in the background, he thought, ‘Are they killing my granddaughter or what?'”

Typically, this is how the call goes: “You will get a call from a number that’s not known to you and there’s probably somebody screaming in the background, which will force you to say that person’s name,” said Watsonville police Sgt. Mish Radish.

But in Pedro’s case, he couldn’t figure out whose name to call out.

“I have 20 and I don’t want anything bad to happen to them,” Pedro said. “So I asked, ‘What’s up?’ And they just hung up.”

In another recent case, the victim was on the phone with the kidnapper and on her way to transfer money when she flagged an officer and found out it was a scam.

But one Watsonville family wasn’t so lucky.

“They said that the person was in a traffic accident in the city that they were in and that they took the person, that they are holding him for ransom, from there they kept the caller on the phone the entire time until they drove to a local store here, wired some money to Mexico,” Radish said.

That’s a few thousand dollars they can’t get back.

“If money is wired into Mexico, we have virtually no way of tracking it. We don’t know who picked up the money there or at which Western Union location,” Radish said.