A job offer from the United Kingdom is almost impossible for a 21-year-old street vendor from Nigeria that when he got such an opportunity, he readily accepted.
The poor man from Lagos was doubly lucky as the senator who made the offer also shouldered all travel expenses, including his flight to London and medical tests.
During his medical appointment at the Royal Free Hospital in London, however, he was told by a consultant that he was there for a kidney transplant, BBC reported.
As he was clueless that he was there as a kidney donor for Sen. Ike Ekweremadu’s 25-year-old daughter, the transplant operation was canceled.
It is illegal in the UK to reward someone for a kidney donation so Ekweremadu and his wife were charged with violating the country’s modern slavery law. The Nigerian senator and his wife, plus a doctor who helped them recruit the gullible victim, are now on trial for the charges that they deny.
A case worse than buying organs from live persons happened in the United States.
After pleading guilty to mail fraud and aiding and abetting, Megan Hess, 46, was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison and her mother, Shirley Koch, 69, to 15 years, the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado said in a statement.
In the NBC News report, Hess and Koch, who operated a funeral home in Montrose, Colorado, allegedly duped their customers.
They were found guilty of sending back to families cremated remains that were not their grieving customers’ loved ones.
“A plea agreement for Hess cites cases in which legs, arms, heads or whole bodies of those who were to have been cremated were instead sold,” according to NBC News.
They stole and sold body parts or bodies from 2010 to 2018 for medical research through a medical donation foundation created by Hess, according to NBC News.
Remains of those who had infectious diseases were falsely certified as disease-free and then sold, prosecutors added.