On August 6 in downtown Santiago, a Chinese national named Fu Mingkai had just finished a meeting with a Chilean local when two men claiming to be investigative police slapped handcuffs on him and shoved him into a car. They took him to a basement. It turned out to be no police station, but a makeshift fake precinct rigged up by kidnappers, complete with official-looking badges and even a portrait of Donald Trump hanging on the wall to make the charade convincing.
Before long, Fu's sister, Fu Mingxia, arrived at the spot. The gang pulled out a bogus criminal organization chart and tried to terrify the siblings, claiming they were in deep trouble and that the kidnappers had ironclad evidence against them. They threatened arrest and prison time unless the family coughed up 300 million Chilean pesos—roughly two million yuan—to make the case go away. The siblings managed to scrape together 30 million pesos just to get out of there. But the gang wasn't finished, and kept hounding them by phone for the rest of the money.
Local media reports say the case keeps getting deeper. Current and former members of the Chilean investigative police, and even former prosecutor Vinko Fodich, are reportedly mixed up in it. The implicated ex-prosecutor has already confessed to prosecutors that the insiders and the kidnappers split the ransom cash among themselves. Chilean prosecutors are pressing ahead with kidnapping, extortion, and criminal conspiracy charges, leaving locals shaking their heads at how anyone could pull off a bootleg police station these days. It just goes to show you need to keep your wits about you when you are far from home.
