14 DAY TRIAL // A Canadian man ultimately paid with his life for trusting an online website claiming to offer living donor kidney transplants in the Philippines. A U.S. citizen already wanted for fraud has been arrested under the suspicion of instrumenting the scam.
Jerome Feldman, 67, has been taken into custody in Guam for running an online scheme offering live organ transplants. He was already a fugitive, being wanted in Florida for health-care fraud charges after he activated as a psychiatrist there.
According to the prosecutors, Feldman tricked, through a fake website, vulnerable and ill people out of an estimated $400,000. “Living donor kidney transplant is done in two medical centers located in the Philippines. These centers operate in full compliance with the Philippine Ministry of Health and meet all international standards applicable worldwide for transplant centers,” the website claimed.
According to Wired, his victims included a Canadian couple, who paid $70,000 to the fraudster last year in hopes of a kidney transplant that would have saved the husband's life. The man died in a hospital in Philippines, waiting for the kidney that never came.
He checked in the hospital even if the administration told him that they never heard of Dr. Mitch Michaelson, who should have performed the transplant. To rub salt into the wound, the widow was left with an additional $20,000 bill for the time spent in the medical center.
At least six other people have fallen victim to the same scam. New York U.S. Attorney Andrew Baxter described Feldman as a “perpetrator of an unconscionable scheme directed at desperate and vulnerable victims.” The psychiatrist faces as much as 20 years behind bars for wire fraud, if found guilty in the trial that is set to start in a few weeks.
Cyber con artists generally prey on vulnerable individuals, but, as past examples stand to show, the schemes they instrument make victims of all social profiles and the level of education doesn't seem to play such a significant role either. We recently reported the case of a Houston experienced lawyer who had been duped out of $300,000 of his firm's money in an Internet-based check fraud scheme. The attorney had been practicing law for 23 years.
Other online organ transplant schemes come in many forms. Some offer to secure organs from the underground illegal market or move people up on waiting lists faster. However, these are not as common as the illegal virtual pharmacies selling unregulated and potentially dangerous meds, operations that can also prove life-threatening.