Chamber reports daily extortion attempts

Every single day restaurant owners receive calls of extortion attempts, said Restaurant Chamber President Raúl Vásquez.

Most of those calls are made from telephones with area codes of Central Mexico, Vasquez told La Voz newspaper

Normally, callers pretend to be city employees or health department employees who request money for a permit. There have been cases in which suspects call employees and successfully ask to deposit cash in a certain bank account to help restaurant owners.

In other cases, suspects threatened employees and shared pictures taken from eateries’ social media pages.

Vasquez said in one case an employee of a restaurant located in the Plaza Lienzo Shopping Center suspects deposited about $400 USD in Mexican currency while the owner was out of town.

These incidents have occurred although the state Attorney General’s office has held events to educate store owners and has issued flyers to prevent extortion.

The agency has received 15 complaints this year of extortion cases against eateries. Last year the agency recorded 30 extortion cases and three extortion attempt cases.

Based on city records, Vasquez said every day 100 calls of extortion attempts are made to Mexicali businesses. The chamber president told the newspaper many phone numbers used to extort victims in the city have already been identified.

At the same time, many business owners are not reporting all cases.

Last year, phone extortion was the most frequent crime against businesses in Baja California with 30.6% of all crimes, according to a study conducted by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography. The study stated over four of every five crimes were not reported by companies.

Vasquez said Mexicali Police and the state Attorney General’s office have provided employees with seminars to prevent the crime.

The newspaper said almost all victims of Whatsapp cloning did not have two-step verification.

The authorities called potential victims to avoid providing personal information to suspects, try to gather information about dialers, stop children or senior adults from answering without supervision and not follow suspect requests.