Paul Joseph Fronczak is not actually Paul Joseph Fronczak. Nor is he Scott McKinley. In fact, he has no idea who he is.

Last month, a Queens man was grabbed off the street, thrown into an SUV, and then taken to a warehouse where he was burned with acid and beaten, while his kidnappers tried to get $3 million from the man's relatives in Ecuador in exchange for a safe release.

Aftab Aslam may have failed his Georgia Gwinnett College English class (twice), but he definitely earned an A in "Faking Your Own Kidnapping, Worrying the Hell Out of Your Parents, and Wasting Police Resources: 101".

A mother of a 4-year-old in New Mexico chased down her child's abductor and rammed him with her car after a seven-mile pursuit, leading to the safe return of her daughter and the arrest of the suspect.

Speaking at a forum on human trafficking at Johns Hopkins University, kidnapping and rape survivor Elizabeth Smart offered personal insight into why someone in an ordeal similar to the one she endured would have a hard time running away from their captor.

The thing about reenacting a movie trope in real life, is that real life consequences will follow. Always. Because it's not a movie. Gravity, judgement, debt, concerned witnesses, police, repercussions all exist.

For whatever reason, August tends to be a big month for horror movies. This week finds three of them landing in theaters: Ole Bornedal's The Possession, Doug Aarniokoski's The Day and Pascal Laugier's The Tall Man. All seem like straightforward genre exercises at first glance; none actually are. They're fucked up. Maybe not in the sick, fun this-so-fucked-up-that-it's-gonna-make-me-throw-up way, but fucked up all the same. Here's a breakdown of these deviants of deviant cinema.

Will this bunny crime wave never end? Days after the tragic death of earless German bunny Til, a floppy-eared bunny named Miss Cooper has been kidnapped from her home in the window of a stylish boutique in Manhattan.

I don't mean to come off as a "sheltered Susan" who's not "street smart" about "how these things work," but I found this story a wee bit more disturbing than would be indicated by the paltry level of media attention it received. How do you become a prostitute in Brooklyn these days? Just by being snatched off the street, at random!

Taking people hostage used to mean something, you know? If you took a guy hostage, it was a big deal. It was a bond for life! These days, though? These days you can't trust your hostages farther than you can throw them, after you've killed them and wrapped their bodies in tarp.

A masked man in dark clothes 'attacks' a 26-year-old foreign exchange student while she has a cigarette outside in Pleasant Prairie, Wisc., only to give up and flee when she fights back. Just another bizarre crime in America's heartland? Or the start... of the most pathetic story of the year?

Sound the alarm! Alert the authorities that haven't already been alerted! Michaele Salahi, White House party-crasher turned temporary Real Housewives star, has maybe been abducted, claims her husband.

Following the sentencing of Philip and Nancy Garrido for the kidnapping, imprisonment and rape of Jaycee Dugard, whom they had abducted at 11 and held captive for 18 years, Judge Douglas Phimister allowed the release of an abridged version Dugard's grand jury testimony, described the events of her kidnapping and the conditions in which she was held hostage.

After reported attempts to abduct female students at Rider University and The College of New Jersey, Tony Kadyhrob—who looks like Christopher Walken but is just a guy from Lawrence, NJ—has taken his creepy sideshow to Princeton. He's an upwardly mobile wannabe kidnapper?

A sixteen-year-old was arrested in Brooklyn on Wednesday for kidnapping the daughter of an acquaintance after the acquaintance "smacked" her for eating the last of his hot pockets. Yes! That is what happened, according to the Staten Island Advance, which cites "a law enforcement source"; the suspect, one Aliyah Austin—"a transient from Brooklyn"—was, in fact, briefly cohabitating with the unnamed "acquaintance" and apparently providing babysitting services. ("The source," the Advance tell us, "could not immediately say how Ms. Austin met the victim's father.") In any case, it was the fateful hot pocket-related "smack" (surely that qualifies as domestic abuse?) that set this particular wheel in motion:

Ann Pettway, who allegedly kidnapped Carlina White as an infant in 1987, has turned herself in, apparently after contacting a police officer on Facebook. She'll face federal kidnapping charges, plus a lot of people wondering what her deal is.

A lengthy new report on the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl says that a photo of a hand definitively proves that 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed killed and decapitated Pearl, on video.

Carlina White, kidnapped as an infant from a New York hospital in 1987, reunited with her mother this week after finding herself on a missing children website. So if you've had suspicions about your parents, now's the time to check.

Mississippi man Thomas Steven Sanders was arrested in Mississippi on Sunday in the kidnapping and murder of Las Vegas 12-year-old Lexis Roberts. Which must have come as a surprise to his family, who declared him dead in 1994.

Fans of Harry Potter are responsible for a recent wave of owl disappearances in India by taking them from the wild and keeping them as pets, says India's environment minister. That, and they're being used in black magic rituals. [AFP]