A man, Yuan, in China kidnapped his own granddaughter and asked for a $72,000 ransom so he could continue gambling

A man in China kidnapped his own granddaughter and asked for a $72,000 ransom so he could continue gambling 😳🎲.

A Shanghai man was sentenced to prison for kidnapping his own granddaughter so he could maintain his gambling addiction with the ransom money.

The kidnapping — orchestrated by a 65-year-old man identified only by his surname, Yuan — was first reported by the Shanghai Law and Rule Journal. The legal news outlet didn’t specify when the incident occurred but wrote on April 18 that Yuan had just started serving his prison sentence.

Yuan kicked off his plan by picking up his four-year-old granddaughter from her kindergarten and taking her out to eat and shop without her mother’s knowledge, the Journal reported.

The girl’s mother then arrived at the school and realized her daughter was missing. She received a message from Yuan demanding $72,000, according to the Journal.

The media outlet’s report cited an account in the Shanghai Law Journal, a legal periodical based in China’s largest city.

Notably, no information about the account described in the journal is provided regarding when this incident supposedly took place, with media outlets reporting on it also not providing any information about it.

But while in prison, the grandfather blamed his daughter for everything, saying she is suing him and “just wants me dead,” and said the entire incident isn’t anything for law enforcement to deal with because it was a family matter, according to the SCMP.

Ultimately, the man supposedly eventually managed to adapt to prison life. According to Asiaone, several other Chinese outlets have covered the story and a video covering the incident on Weibo has accrued over three million views.

However, it also reflects another issue: That of child trafficking in China. Though data can be hard to come by regarding China due to a lack of disclosed information on the part of the government, UNICEF, citing China’s Public Security Ministry, said that between 2000 and 2007, there were 45,507 known cases of children and women being trafficked, though noting that the actual number was likely much higher.