Extortionists in Peru are becoming ever bolder: executing bus drivers at the wheel and detonating bombs at schools, holding the country in a grip of fear as police struggle to crack down.

It is a crime attractive to organized gangs but increasingly also to individual scamsters. Extortion complaints in the South American country soared by 540 percent from 2023 to over 15,000 last year, according to the justice ministry’s Indaga crime observatory.

Extortion is “easy to commit and hard to combat,” said police colonel Roger Cano, fighting an uphill battle against the scourge with a brigade of 50 officers working from a dilapidated building in the capital Lima.

All you need, really, is a cellphone from which to make threats.

The owner of a small clothing store in Lima told AFP how her life

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