Feb 15, 2011

Mexican Kidnappers use Google to select victims

02:41 PM

Mexican crime gangs are using Google searches to help scout out fresh victims for random kidnappings, which can turn deadly.

Michael Guidry, founder and CEO of The Guidry Group, which provides security for 22 billionaires, gave a chilling account Monday of how bad guys use free Internet services and mobile computing devices to gather intelligence to grab victims.

He made his remarks Monday at the Mobile Security Symposium occurring alongside the giant RSA cybersecurity conference in San Franciso.

About 18 days ago, he says, a high-ranking executive of a large corporation got off a plane in Monterrey, Mexico. Just a few minutes before, opportunistic kidnappers spotted the town car driver sent to pick up the executive and take him to his hotel. The driver was holding a placard with the company's name and the executive's name.

The criminals photographed the placard, then used Google to look up background on the company and the executive.

"It was completely random," says Guidry. "They went to the driver, gave him 500 dollars in U.S. cash, and told him to go back and say he couldn't find the executive. Within 36 hours after they had kidnapped him, they had issued one ransom demand, and then they killed him."

The executive's corporation declined to quickly meet the kidnapper's ransom demands, said Guidry. The victim was an acquaintance of one of Guidry's clients.

The murder is an extreme example of new, unprecedented risks stemming from the rapid erosion of personal privacy. The wide use of social networks, like Facebook and Linked In, and the ubiquity of mobile devices to access such information, is putting extensive data into criminals' hands, and sparking criminal creativity.

Social networks "give access to all your information and pictures that you would have once held private," says Guidry. "So now they (criminals) know all of your deepest, darkest secrets."

Guidry says there is a trend of kidnappings begin pulled off more frequently and for much lower ransom demands than in the past.

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