Odd News of the Day

Here is an article copied from Yahoo! News:

MADRID (Reuters) - A Spanish woman staged fake kidnappings of her son four times and got his father to pay her more than a million euros ($1.26 million) in ransom money, newspaper El Mundo reported Friday.

Police in the southern Spanish city of Seville arrested the woman and five accomplices, including the 15-year-old son who cooperated in the deception by calling his father on the telephone and begging him to pay up.

The father paid ransoms after the first three fake abductions without realizing the involvement of his son's mother, from whom he had separated. He became suspicious the fourth time and hired a private detective, El Mundo reported.

First, this is as cold as a woman of the night is to an ugly man without money. To have the separated wife trying to get money from her husband is one thing, but to have your own son go in on it with her? That's horrible.

However, I kind of think that maybe the dad didn't have a whole lot going on upstairs, and I think that the most obvious evidence of his lack of understanding comes from the fact that the father didn't get suspicious until the fourth time. I don't know about you, but after two times of paying, what, nearly a third of a million bucks a pop, I'm gonna start getting curious. Further I would start asking myself questions like, "How much do I really like this kid?" and "What is the implied happiness that I would have with my son versus the definite lifestyle that I could afford with all this money?" The fact that he didn't call a private detective until the fourth time makes me think that maybe he shouldn't have that money anyway.

I also makes me think that I should go into the kidnapping teenagers in Spain business, because, if you'll notice, the article curiously leaves out any information of police involvement during the first three kidnappings. It wasn't until the group got greedy the fourth time that police came in to bust some heads.

Three out of four times a group of people in Spain can get away scot-free with kidnapping?

I like those odds.