<strong>This is NOT a Statement Issued by The UN Regarding Organ Trafficking in Middle East Region! Find Out the Facts…</strong>

Due to the intensifying economic crisis in Sri Lanka, many are looking at the prospects of migrating and working in a foreign country. Middle easter destinations are also one of the preferred places. Within this background, there is a viral WhatsApp forward warning from the United Nations regarding the middle east region and saying the recruitment agencies/recruiters are identified as engagers of organ trafficking scams and job seekers should be careful about the issue. This is our investigation about that viral WhatsApp forward.

Social Media Posts

The startling message, currently viral among WhatsApp users in Sri Lanka, states that the UN had alerted about a booming black market in the Middle East for human body parts. Hence, the public should beware of fake foreign agencies that would ultimately kill their victims and recover valuable body parts.

The entire message is seen below.

"UNITED NATIONS ALERT

"The black market for parts of the human body is booming in the Middle East. A kidney now costs 262,000 dollars (131 million CFA francs); the heart costs 119,000 dollars (60 million CFA francs) and the liver costs 157,000 dollars (79 million CFA francs). Beware of fake foreign agencies promising to make you work abroad. They process your papers, pay for your plane ticket and just take you abroad, pretending they want to find you a job, but instead, they kill their victims and recover all the precious parts of their bodies. Many people have been offered jobs in the Middle East and so far, their families have been unable to locate them. SHARE TO SAVE LIVES

Facebook | Archived

As this is impacting the lives of the people, we decided to do a fact-check on this.

Fact Check

In the beginning, we checked the URL mentioned in Viral WhatsApp forward.

https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/organized-crime/intro/emerging-crimes/org

The URL gives a ‘404 error’ saying, “the page or document not found.

Then we checked the same page on the internet archives.

There is no warning associated with UN in the URLs in internet archives also.

Now, it's clear that the URL is not valid.

After that, we checked, using keywords, whether any official UN sites released such a warning. However, there were no such.

Further searching, we were able to find further information regarding this.

UNODC Pakistan confirmed that the purported alert is fake, telling AFP that the message "does not originate from UNODC and contains out-of-date information unrelated to current UNODC activities.” Related AFP articles can be found here. Archived

And also, we were able to find out that such social media posts were spread in Nigeria also. There were claims in Nigeria stating that International Migratory Organization (IMO), a UN agency official, spoke about this organ trafficking and warned the Nigerians willing to migrate to the Middle East.

However, the related UN officer emphasized to the BBC that he didn't make such a statement and that social media posts were fake. However, he further explained to the BBC that they helped hundreds of Nigerians who became victims of human trafficking, but not such organ transplanting scams. A related BBC article can be read here. Archived

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Conclusion

Our investigation found that the UN has not released a statement about a black-market organ harvesting racket being carried out in the Middle East region, which tries to recruit foreign workers in the guise of providing job offers and ends up killing them for organ parts.

The IMO officers also said there had been human trafficking in the middle eastern regions. However, the UN has not released a warning of organ trafficking to aspiring foreign job seekers who are about to enter the middle east.