A Spanish woman was recently arrested on the Spanish island of Tenerife after conspiring with her boyfriend’s family to trick her mother into thinking she had been kidnapped and paying a sizeable ransom.

Earlier this week, Guardia Civil, one of Spain’s two national law enforcement agencies, released a disturbing video that appears to show a blindfolded woman with blood stains on her face, strapped to a chair, and with a large knife at her throat. The young woman is sobbing and telling her mother that she has been kidnapped and that she needs to pay a 50,000 ransom to the kidnappers if she ever wants to see her alive again. However, not everything is as it appears to be…

The ransom video described above is very real, but the kidnapping itself is not. According to Spanish police, the “victim” shown in the footage faked her own kidnapping with the help of her boyfriend’s family solely to trick her own mother into paying the 50,000 euro ransom.

Photo: James Kovin/Unsplash

In the clip released by Guardia Civil, the apparent victim claims that she doesn’t know who her assailants are or why they chose her, but she does instruct her mother to pay the ransom by dropping 50,000 euros in cash at a specific location. She also warns her mother that the kidnappers bugged her house and that any attempt to contact the police would mean the end of her life.

The victim’s mother reportedly agreed to the kidnappers’ demands; she took out the 50,000 euros from the bank, but she also secretly alerted the police about her daughter’s situation. That’s when the puzzle pieces started falling into place.

The police investigation began with a questioning of the victim’s mother, who mentioned that she had already paid a total of 45,000 euros on several occasions, after receiving written threats on he daughter’s life in the mail. In her mind, she was keeping her daughter safe by giving the mysterious criminals what they wanted. She never realized that she was actually the real victim.

Once they learned that the victim’s mother had recently been conned before, police started investigating the victim and her entourage, quickly figuring out that her boyfriend’s family had helped her fix the whole thing. Once the police established that the kidnapping may have been staged, they only needed 24 hours to solve the case.

After activating the kidnapping protocol, officers of the Guardia Civil focused on locating the family of the victim’s boyfriend, and, as luck would have it, managed to find them all, including the allegedly kidnapped woman, in an obscure game room, gambling. They were all taken into custody and eventually confessed to faking the kidnapping.

Upon searching the suspects’ home, the Guardia Civil found tools used for the simulation of the kidnapping, a large knife, the handkerchief with which the young woman was bound, and a bottle of artificial blood.

Believe it or not, people fake their kidnappings all the time, for a variety of reasons. We’ve written about people who staged their kidnapping to skip work, break up with poor boyfriends, and even get out of their own weddings. Extorting your own mother is pretty darn despicable, though.