ON FEBRUARY 19th armed men claiming to be from Boko Haram, a Nigerian Islamist group, snatched a French family from Cameroon. On March 8th news broke of seven construction workers killed by their captors, also Islamists, in northern Nigeria. And three crew members of a cargo ship kidnapped by pirates off Nigeria’s coast in a previously undisclosed attack on February 7th were released.

The Sahel has become a hotspot for such kidnappings, but hostage-takers are active across the world: warring parties in Syria, drug cartels in Mexico, criminal gangs in the Philippines and Colombia’s FARC guerrillas are all holding people captive, for a mix of ideological and business reasons.

America’s National Counter-Terrorism Centre reckons that, in 2010, 6,050 people were taken by terrorists. Kidnappings by other criminals number many more; the true extent is unknown since thousands go unreported. A quarter still occur in Latin America, but Asia has become increasingly dangerous since 2004 and numbers are rising fast in the Middle East and Africa.

A fragmented approach towards kidnapping is undermining efforts to curb it. Governments differ in their policies on paying ransoms and a private sector with its own rules is growing rapidly.

The kidnappers of the French family put out a video demanding the release of fellow Muslim militants in Cameroon and referred obliquely to France’s war in Mali. But political motives are rare, even for organisations such as the Taliban in Pakistan. “Kidnapping is predominantly a money-grab,” says Greg Bangs, who runs kidnapping and ransom insurance at Chubb, a New Jersey-based insurer. “In Mexico, the kidnap capital of the world, it is a career: they get up in the morning, do this all day and then go home to their wives,” he says.

Westerners taken by Islamist militants are worth the most—al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) got an average payment of $5.4m per hostage in 2011, according to American officials. Ransoms for other kidnappers tend to be a few hundred thousand dollars—still enough to make hostage-taking lucrative. “Tiger” kidnappings to force a relative to carry out a task, such as smuggling drugs, are also popular, says David Ryan, a former negotiator for the British government.

Hostages are usually safely released upon the payment of a ransom. But that is the foundation for a successful business. Stratfor, a private spook outfit, estimates that AQIM has made $90m in the past decade from kidnapping Westerners. This was a huge boost to its income and helped it to put up a surprisingly strong fight against the French in Mali.

Nigerian police said in January that Hyundai, a South Korean company, paid $190,000 to release six workers who had been taken by a criminal gang. Mr Bang estimates 80% of Fortune 500 companies have kidnapping and ransom cover. Wealthy individuals buy it too. In other cases, relatives pay the ransom. In 2009 Somali militants released Nigel Brennan, an Australian photographer, from his 15-month captivity when his family mortgaged their house to raise the ransom.

Algeria, America, Australia and Britain say they do not pay ransoms—a policy backed by Terry Waite, an Anglican church envoy held captive in Beirut from 1987 to 1991. Australian officials told Mr Brennan’s relatives they could face a jail term if they transferred money to a group considered a terrorist organisation. (Australia deemed Mr Brennan’s kidnappers criminals so did not prosecute, but warned that other countries may act differently.) America has thought about doing the same.

Some states have gone further and tried to outlaw all payments or even dealing with kidnappers: in 1991 Italy enacted legislation banning not only the paying of ransoms but also negotiations. Others reckon such legal bars are not the answer: “Everyone has a right to life. Not paying is essentially holding a gun to someone’s head, too,” says Mr Brennan. Tackling the insecurity that allows kidnappings to occur is a better long-term bet.

Governments are becoming less involved as the private counter-kidnap industry grows. America’s FBI has a dedicated-hostage rescue team, but many government forces are badly trained so families instead turn to security firms, says Douglas McDonald, a former American cloak-and-dagger man who runs NIA, a security firm which works mainly in Latin America and has trained government officials to deal with kidnappers. “Many agencies want to go kick in the door,” he says, but slow negotiations will usually work better. After months without progress the Brennan family hired a private company. Four months later they had bartered down the ransom from $3m to $650,000.

The business can be tempting for the public sector, too. Mexico’s Congress reckons its own security forces are involved in 20% of kidnappings in the country (other estimates reach 80%). That puts a new gloss on “state capture”, a jargon term for a kind of deep official corruption.