Kidnapping - a Crime Industry

KRE - Kidnap, Ransom and Extortion has been coming back to attention for the larger audience with the islamistic-related kidnappings in the framework of the Syrian civil war. Regardless of the last years discussion of the relation between terror-financing and ransom payments, KRE is an already well established criminal „business“ model since years especially in the so called „prone of crisis“ around the world. This kind of crime becomes more and more attractive to conduct as the cost-benefit equitation includes a relatively small risk ratio for persecution by kidnapping exposed single individuals from their normal - safely believed - social environment.  

As the attention of risk-awareness against KRE usually focus on „high-valuable-targets“ like executive managers it is currently likely to stem from the KRE related numbers, that the quantity of relatively small ransom sum cases has significantly increased, especially in Nigeria, which is leading the countries list of reported KRE related crimes.

Nevertheless, this kind of business is not just only a problem of political instabile regions which are affected of civil war, terrorism and organized crime as the recently attempted kidnapping of the German billionaire son Markus Würth in southern Germany has shown in June this year. For more information about the case please look for the online news link below.

News Article in The Telegraph