Intellectual Property Law

Costly Online Organ-Transplant Scam Results in Death, Arrest

By Ryan Singel, Kevin Poulsen, Sarah Lai Stirland, Kim Zetter, and David Kravets

Federal authorities claim the operator of the website, liver4you.org, duped patients into paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for organ transplants that never materialized. One man died waiting for a liver.

The authorities have arrested a U.S. fugitive in Guam accused of running a bogus online organ transplant service that duped very ill people out of as much as $400,000 ? a scam prosecutors said Thursday led to the death of Canadian man who was expecting a liver.

The allegations against Jerome Feldman, 67, a psychiatrist wanted in Florida on health-care fraud charges, underscores how easy it is to take advantage of desperately ill people willing to pay for what seems like a life-saving opportunity on the internet.

The case against Feldman is the latest in shams relating to the organ transplant market, which is rife with problems. Among others, they include underground organ markets, bribes to move to the top of waiting lists and even murder to harvest organs from the dead.

The latest example concerns a Canadian couple. After seeing Feldman's online site, liver4you.org, the pair wired $70,000 to a New York bank account for Feldman last year. In exchange, the husband was promised he would get a new liver at a hospital in the Philippines.

The man checked into the hospital in July, where he died after the hospital refused to provide a transplant. The hospital said it had never heard of a "Dr. Mitch Michaelson," the doctor who was supposed to save the man's life.

New York U.S. Attorney Andrew Baxter accused Feldman on Thursday of being a "perpetrator of an unconscionable scheme directed at desperate and vulnerable victims."

Adding insult to injury, the hospital billed the dead man's widow $20,000.

The authorities said there are as many as six other victims duped by Feldman. His site, liver4you.org, was active as of Friday morning.

Regarding his online organ scam, Feldman is accused of wire fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. He is expected to enter a plea in New York federal court within weeks.

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Full post as published by Threat Level on March 20, 2009 (boomark / email).