'We Have Your Daughter - Do Exactly As I Say!' My Living Nightmare

I was sitting at the end of my bed watching the news. I had just dropped my daughter off at the school for basketball practice. It was 5:07 PM and I had 1 hour to kill before I needed to pick her up.

Then the phone rang.

It wasn’t a number I recognized, I do not normally answer unknown numbers, but I had just submitted a request for information on a website earlier in the day and thought it might be someone calling me.

I hear a man on the other end of the phone who says, “Do exactly as I say and I will not harm your daughter! Do not call the police, don’t do anything stupid or you will never see her again!

The unfamiliar voice puts what sounded exactly like my daughter hysterically crying, “Dad, they have me, please help me.”

What followed next was 2 hours of hell.

Apparently there is a rash of what police are calling virtual kidnapping. The callers target affluent areas of the country and find enough information online to make their scam plausible. Most likely completely random until they get a “hit” on the phone.

I had no idea that I was being played. I truly believed my daughter’s life was at stake and I did everything I was instructed to do. I had just heard my daughter’s voice on the phone for god sakes!

The kidnapper asked me how much money I had on me. I told him $500, of which I did not have on me, but I thought that was what I could get out of an ATM. He became extremely irritated and told me.

“How much cash can you get right now?” he asked.

“What is a daughter worth? Anything? Everything!”

I said, “I could maybe get $1,000 but my ATM limits me and I don’t know what you want me to do!?! The banks are closed, I cannot get any more money out. What do you want me to do?”

The voice — calm and commanding with a faint african but an Americanized command of the language, would become highly irritated at moments when I did not give him the answers he wanted — warned me not to try to get help from anyone. Otherwise, they would kill my daughter. I was instructed if I hung up the phone I would never see her again. Go straight to the bank. Go to the drive thru so no one sees me or asks questions. Always reeling me in with constant reminders not to veer off course. There is someone watching me from a far.

My youngest daughter had just been dropped off at school. I did not watch her actually go into the door because there were people around and some of her teammates had walked in ahead of her. I had no way of knowing if she was safe.

They told me that they were in trouble with the law and they just needed some cash to get out of town and they did not want to harm my daughter. When I told them that my phone was going to disconnect when I left the house because I was on Wifi calling, he freaked out on me. Told me I could not hang up and if I did it was over! He said, “How about I put it to you this way? Maybe this will get your attention?”

What I heard next was that same terrified hysterical crying little girl “Dad…I don’t want to die! Please!”

I have never been so terrified in my life. Again, they told me they wouldn’t hesitate to kill her. The crying child on the other end of the line sounded EXACTLY like my daughter. It was as real and terrifying as anything in this world! Words cannot begin to describe the terror I heard in this little girls voice. IT was REAL!! The words she used, the tone, the crying, the hysteria...all very, very, very real!

The caller told me they were watching me from a far and if I did anything stupid, it was over! I then proceeded to the bank, withdrew $700 (the max) and he instructed me to go into the Tom Thumb and we would do an exchange. He wanted it to be in a public place so nothing would go wrong and that there were a lot of people around so no one would be suspicious. When I walked into the store, he pretended that he got spooked and that I was attempting to let someone know something was wrong. Now he wanted me to wire the money to Mexico and I was going to give him a voucher in exchange for my daughter. That was the only way it was going to happen. When I asked to see my daughter, he freaked again and told me don’t be stupid over $700!

My stupid fucking Sprint phone does not allow me to use data or text while I am on the phone, so I could not text anyone or see my kids locations. When I got to Tom Thumb I nervously got onto Wifi and I was able to see my daughter’s phone was still at the school. Even though it showed her at the school, I could not take a chance on her life until I knew for certain what was going on. People were calling me, but I could not answer the phone.

My oldest daughter was at home and heard all of this going down. She saw the panic in me and when I left, she called her boyfriend to come get her because she was scared. His mom got on the phone and immediately called my wife and the police. The Southlake police department was on top of things right away, but no one knew exactly where I was.

As soon as I wired the money, he asked me to go outside, then he asked me to read all the information on the wire from Western Union. In the back of my mind, I began to become suspicious. I stopped doing what he was telling me to do inside the store to see if he could really see me. I told him I was sitting in the Starbucks in the store, which I was not.

I asked again, where is my daughter?

Then he says to me, “Your standing in the Wal-mart right?” I said no, I told you I am in the Tom Thumb. “Ok, read me the instructions on the wire again and tell me the city and state you are in?”

BOOM! It hit me like a ton of bricks, I was being scammed. I was so panic stricken that I had lost almost all rational thought. However, when I did the wire, I used a fake name that was similar to mine and a fake old address because I didn’t want them to have my real name or address. I don’t know why this dawned on me, but I was testing them. I remember him asking me, “Do you have another name?” I said no! “He said are you sure?” again, I confidently said yes, but in the back of my mind, I thought if they had my daughter and she gave them my real name, I might be in trouble.

While I was driving he would ask me to honk my horn to make sure I was driving. He would ask me where I was at all times. “Where are you now?” he would say. Every car in my rear view mirror looked like it was following me.

“I’ll call you Dad, and you call me Son,” he told me as I am standing at the counter trying to wire the money. “We don’t want anyone to ask questions. Now I want you to calm down Dad. You have to be strong for your daughter. I want to see you be a man. Take a deep breath, everything is going to work out!” he says to me.

He talked to me throughout the whole ordeal, making sure he had my attention every minute. As soon as I might be questioning, he knew exactly what to say to reel me back into the moment.

His story kept changing while we were talking, but I didn’t listen close enough. I was 10 steps behind on my emotional capacity to understand what was going on between the enormous amounts of adrenaline, cotton mouth, and shear panic!

This was shear terror that I hope no parent EVER has to go through.

And none of it was true!

My daughter was still at basketball and once I realized what was going on, I just got in my car and drove straight there and called her and her coach until someone answered the phone. Finally the coach’s phone picked up and it was my daughter!! I have never been so relieved in my life! I just said oh my God, thank you, I will be there soon. And she was like “huh?” Of course she had no idea what was going on, I ran into the gym walked over to her and just broke down and gave her a big hug! I think I freaked her out even more, because she had no idea what was going on.

Apparently, there are scores of families that have been targeted in California, in places like Beverly Hills, since last year. It is happening in New York and Texas and now there’s a rash of them in the Washington region. When I read the stories, they are identical!

The scammers gather enough online information to target their victims. They will involve co-conspirators to legitimize what is happening. By zip code, it’s easy to tell that we live in a nice suburb of Dallas.

While there is a chance they may have had some information on me, I think (I hope) the timing of everything was dumb luck! If they had called 30 minutes sooner, it would have been a much different outcome.

I think it’s possible that the man who reached me knew nothing about me until I picked up the phone. Once I was on the phone, I gave him all the information he needed, I just didn’t know I was doing it. It was so well scripted, rehearsed, and thought out that they knew how to get information out of me that they could in turn use against me.

I think there is a very good chance he made call after call, reaching voice mails and plenty of folks who don’t even have children, or who have sons, or whose kids were right there at home, or who didn’t sound at all like the screaming woman who was in on the caper. Those folks hang up and rarely call police. The number was a 525 area code. When we got disconnected, the number would change. When I tried to call back I could not call back because it appeared to be a US based number, but it was actually in Mexico. I didn’t know that at the time!

So the caller tries again and again, until he reaches the ideal victim.

Today it was me!

My whole ordeal lasted about an hour. It was by far the worst hour of my life! After I realized what was going on, they guy kept calling back for 30 minutes until the police picked up the phone and he hung up and never called back. It was finally over!

The guy clearly wanted to get more money out of me, which was why he was calling back. When I finally spoke to the police, they told me a year ago a similar incident happened where they pulled a man over going 90 on the hwy and he told them the exact same story, only this time they had his girlfriend’s brother.

This is not a joke! This really happened to me this evening and I want everyone to know about this scam. Be on the lookout for this. There is a person in Mexico City named Sonia Viviriana Juarez Martinez that was the kind recipient of my $700. Once I knew it was a scam, all I could do was go straight to the school to make sure my daughter was ok. That allowed them the time they needed to collect the funds!

I wanted me to tell my story so others don’t fall prey to the same scam.

To the motherfuckers that did this, I am going to find you, in this life or the next. You took away something from me that I will never get back. You took away a sense of security that I will never have again and for that I am going to find you. The one thing you did not take is my determination! Be looking over your shoulder, because in the great words of Wyatt Erp, “You tell them I’m coming…and hell’s coming with me! You hear me? Hell’s coming with me!”