Wealthy Mexicans Getting Chipped in Case of Abduction

Because the number of abductions in Mexico has jumped almost 40% in the past 3 years, the wealthy are getting subcutaneous transmitters so they can be tracked when kidnapped. Xega, the Mexican security firm which makes the chips, has seen a sales jump of 13% this year. The company injects the crystal-encased chip, the size and shape of a grain of rice, into clients' bodies with a syringe. The chip then sends radio signals to a larger device carried by the client with a global positioning system in it. A satellite can then be used to find the location of the missing person. Things must be a lot worse in Mexico than I thought.

Re:So exactly what is the implant for?

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is that if the implant can no longer communicate with the larger device, a trigger goes off to notify the service to start looking for that person in the last known location. After that, you're really working with a perimeter that grows by time.

Mij

Re:ewww

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a place for the horror factor in this business apparently...it's great for convincing the family to pay up sooner. There is a recent case (it happened within the last year) of a Plastics Surgery practice run by a father and son team of MD's working out of Baja catering to US patients looking for bargain basement prices on their cosmetics procedures. They were making big bucks putting up their patients in a Luxury Spa Resort just south of Rosarito (10 miles south of the Tiajuana/US Border) where they could get their various facelifts, tummy tucks, etc for half of what they would pay in the US. Problem is, the Dad and Son had a thing for big fancy cars and showing off how much money they were making. That drew the wrong kind of attention. The son was kidnapped, and the kidnappers sent a finger every few days until the family paid up... They paid up as quickly as they could (it takes time to convert your assets to cash you know) and the son was returned, but not before losing all but the pinky finger on his right hand. Makes it hard to operate that way I'm afraid. Between stuff like this and the war between the Cartels the Federales, none of my friends go surfing down there anymore.

Re:Hmmm, what could be the problem here?

[Panoramix]

I think the story is wrong. This company, "Xega" (website [xega.com.mx], in Spanish) seems to be offering two different products. One is the "Verichip", which seems to be a subcutaneous RFID chip intended for identification. Like for (very paranoid) access control, or medical emergencies.

The other product is called "VIP" and seems to be a GPS + GPRS device. You press a button on that thing and it transmits your current position to some server.

I see no indication that both gadgets are related in any way. Well, the website is all fluff, so I can't really say, but I think the story is mixing them up.

Still, that "VIP" thing does strike me as rather useless, since the first thing a kidnapper does is point a gun at you and make sure you stay still, with your hands in view. And the second thing is emptying your pockets.

And yes, I live in Mexico, and I've been kidnapped... well, just a couple hours, while I was being mugged. See I got off from work around midnight, hailed a cab in the street and boarded it. The driver took off, I even chatted with that fucker. But once we were in a dark-ish, lonely street, he suddendly stopped the car, pointed a gun at me, and two men from another car that was following us quickly got into the cab. One of them pressed a knife against my stomach and ordered me to "act naturally". They took me for the "ATM ride" (cash withdrawals from different ATM machines all over town, until all the cards were dry). They also got the cash I was carrying on me, of course, as well as my laptop (powerbook 5300... shit, I miss that ugly brick). They gave me back my wallet with my IDs, and some papers from work I asked them to take out of the laptop case. They dropped me off at a Metro station.

This was back in '97 I think, in Mexico City. A month later I was living in Guadalajara, and haven't had any such experiences since.

Re:Wonderful

[rrohbeck]

So we'll need to inject all girls with one of those too. Problem solved.

Re:Please make it stop

[flosofl]

From Wikipedia's article Crime in Mexico [wikipedia.org]:

During the first three years of Fox's government, the official number of reported kidnappings showed a slight decrease, from 505 in 2001 to 438 in 2003. The new Federal Investigation Agency (Procuraduria de Justicia) reported dismantling 48 kidnapping rings and saving 419 victims.

Now those aren't recent numbers (about 4 years back). But still even if they reduced them to 300/yr since then (which I think would be miraculous) a 40% increase would mean an avg of over 1 person per day.

I remember seeing a a documentary on personal armored vehicles (think a Navigator with about a ton of armor and ballistic glass). They said that the number one money maker for criminals in Mexico City was kidnapping. The armorers said that next to the Middle East, their top market was Mexico City specifically because of all the kidnappings.

Re:All aboard the clue train.

[letxa2000]

Brazilian economy is ten times bigger than Mexico's.

Ten times bigger? Brazil = $1.314 trillion [cia.gov]. Mexico = $893.4 billion [cia.gov]. Brazil's economy isn't even twice as large as Mexico's. And while your economy is slightly larger, Mexico's per capita GDP is $12,800 while Brazil's is $9,700.

Sorry, Mexico is doing better than Brazil by any meaningful measure. But yes, Brazil has more people earning less money than Mexico. What Brazil lacks in personal income it makes up for in population quantity.

Radio beacon telling crooks who's worth abducting?

[D4C5CE]

No need to even decode communications from the RFID implant - holding up a crowd at gunpoint, would-be hijackers may just have to detect the carrier frequency emanating from a person (with a device that even high-school students could build), and "abduct only the chipped" for maximum ransom.

Moreover, their victims will be unfortunate enough to undergo removal procedures that are reported to be "one ugly mess [osdir.com]" (didn't look up the original quote, IIRC it was by CASPIAN's [nocards.org] Katherine Albrecht) even with the benefit of optimal surgical attention, which they are unlikely to receive - to the contrary, kidnappers on the run may consider it reasonable to quickly sacrifice "part of" their prey, making the "fear for life and limb" quite literal, with emphasis on the latter, while putting the abducted in a condition that will leave little time for negotiations.