Following last month’s tragic kidnapping and slaying of a Canadian man in the Philippines, fresh awareness has been shone on the need for travellers to take necessary precautions when visiting high-risk countries – especially as the fastest growing form of kidnappings targets middle-class citizens.
Coined “express kidnappings”, the business model is growing among organized crime, cartels and terrorists, focusing on lower-net worth individuals in exchange for lower ransoms – and a shorter turnaround time.
“When people think of kidnap and ransom, they think of high profile events that you see in the news; they don’t think of the myriad of events that can happen that affect people like me and you, that never get reported,” says Mark Gill, product strategy specialist at Seven Corners Inc. “Kidnappers know that they’ll garner less attention and they’ll get the ransoms faster. Sometimes they’ll take five or six people at a time.”
Gill says that for carriers and brokers providing Kidnapping and Ransom products, getting the word out about this new form of hostage holding, which has quadrupled over the last decade, is a main challenge.
“Because a lot of these events go unreported, a lot of travellers are unaware of how often they actually happen.” He says. “Creating the need in the mind of the travellers can be difficult. There are some travellers who go places frequently enough that they know it happens, but for the general population, they’re just unaware that it’s a risk.”
There are a number of K&R carriers in Canada including Travellers,
Chubb and
Aon, but the extent of kidnapping occurrences in the country remain unclear – often intentionally, as 70% of the estimated 20,000 kidnappings that occur worldwide annually go unreported to the authorities.
“The kidnap and ransom market has been in the dark for a long time, and for a good reason – carriers don’t want necessarily everyone to know that their coverage exists so when a kidnapping does happen - and it depends on the country - a lot of times, it’s not beneficial to contact the authorities,” Gill says. “Sometimes that can complicate things, so the carriers will resolve the situations, and no one will ever know that it happened.”
Havoscope, a global data-based source of black market information, reports there $1.5 billion in ransom payments are paid annually, with the average ransom demanding $2 million. Mexico tops the list for at-risk countries for kidnapping and ransom, followed by India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Venezuala.
