Video games are great for a lot of things, and thePS4often provides its players with relief from boredom and ways toconnect with friends amidst the Coronavirus pandemic, but recently it has seen its greatest use ever. A kidnapping victim in Japan used her captor’s PS4 to alert the authorities of her location, ultimately resulting in her escaping and being reunited with her family.
It’s not often that stories like these surface, and even less often that they involve aPS4of all things. The victim was a young girl that fell prey to the kidnapper after a pen-pal type relationship turned into something far more unhealthy.
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Despite the fact that thefirst 72 hours of a missing persons caseare often the most important, she had been missing for over a month when word finally came through to the authorities. After reaching out, Japanese police were able to locate and rescue the girl.
According to NHK, a Japanese news source, the girl was abducted from school and kept isolated from the world in the captor’s basement. Here she was tied to an iron pipe and stripped of all valuables and methods of communication. Fortunately, she must have been an avid gamer or at least familiar with the console, as she was able to use his PS4 to send emails to the police while the captor was away from home. It’s unclear whether she used a controller to do this or somehow operated thePS4’s voice commands, but it is certainly an impressive feat.
After infiltrating the home, police found the young girl tied to the iron pipe and freed her. Thankfully, she was not physically harmed and was returned to her family. The kidnapper was confronted and arrested, and it was revealed that he was involved in many other unsolved crimes before this. Ultimately, the young girl should be given all the praise for heringenuity and ability to act under stressthat led to her saving, but it is nice to know that the PS4 was able to be used in such a monumentally important way.
For those wondering how she managed tosend an email on the PS4, it must have been through the system’s built in web browser. Though it doesn’t seem much use day to day by gamers due to its clunky user interface, it would surely be capable of sending an email and that is apparently enough to save a life.
