These extortion tables, according to the PNC, are developed when an extortionist leader meets, who can be a sector leader who has several phones in his possession and who brings together with prisoners “experts in threats and extortive speech”.
To each of these inmates the leader gives them a phone with balance and internet to call their victims, whose telephone numbers are in a list. If inmate threats take effect, they provide a bank account number of any of all extortionists. To ensure the payment, they send to a “collector” who is outside the jail to exercise fear in the victim if he opposes the collection. They also withdraw the money from bank accounts.
Forced
The extortionists place owners or dependent on neighborhood stores and tell them that when someone gets to buy a balance recharge, write down the number in a notebook, who observed how you saw, with whom it arrives, and realizes all possible features.
The shopkeeper is forced to send the victim’s telephone number to the extortionist so that he will prove threats and demand the money, under the argument that he knows his movements and meets his family.
They take pictures
According to the PNC, the criminals use collaborators who enter the homes to leave propane gas, purified water or that they extract the garbage, so that they take photographs of the interior of the property or collect the characteristics of the family members and their assets.
According to police investigators, the investigations to detect these structures are complex, because in general, the collector does not know the extortionist because “among them the collectors are exchanged.”
In February 2024, the Ministry of the Interior (Mingob) presented the Special Group against Extortion (GECE), composed of 440 PNC agents and will have 400 motorcycles and two highways at its disposal. The purpose of this police group is to combat extortion.
The objective is that while the Public Ministry and police officers collect information in a certain place, motorized personnel will protect the area and will be ready to capture.