A kidnapped girl is found because her kidnapper allowed her gaming on her console. What sounds crazy has really happened in the USA. An American agency reports.
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a Nintendo Switch was used to locate a missing 15-year-old girl and bring her back to her family. The IP address of the Switch revealed the location of the playing girl to the agency.
The girl had met her kidnapper online and went missing after the first meeting with him. He had taken her home to Arizona, about 3,000 kilometers away, where he hid her.
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Because the girl was allowed to play with her console, the Switch reveals the location
After attempts to find her in the neighborhood had failed, a friend noticed that the girl’s “Nintendo Switch Online” account had recent activity and alerted the authorities.
According to court documents, the kidnapper allowed the girl to take her Nintendo Switch on the trip. When she connected her Switch to the internet to “watch YouTube and download a game,” a friend informed the police about her online status.
Nintendo then released the kidnapper’s IP address upon request, and the agency was able to locate the apartment where the girl had been hidden.
A retired head of the “Arizona Department of Public Safety” stated that no one would have thought they would find such a child again:
It is probably nothing that anyone would have thought at this point. The fact that someone else was walking down the street – another child – and was smart enough to say: ‘Hey, look, my friend is online, and she is missing, and I need to tell someone.’
Other fraudsters used parents’ fears to get their money or other things. Some people are now faking a kidnapping and using deceptively realistic voices from AI.
Desperate mother says: “It was completely her voice” – Cybercriminals fake a kidnapping with AI
