The members of an illegal human kidney trade ring in central Vietnam earns a profit of hundreds of millions of dong for each removed kidney, but pays only VND150 million (US$7,200) to each seller.
The ring members are illegal intermediaries between kidney sellers and recipients. According to current Vietnamese law, donating organs is lawful, but selling them is banned.
Therefore, ring members advertise themselves on the Internet as family relatives of a patient in need of a kidney.
Kidney sellers, mostly poor young men, have to undergo different health checks and tests before going for an operation to remove a kidney and transplant it into a recipient.
The ring has around ten members, led by a woman named Yen, her younger sister Ha, and other henchmen called Dung, Nhat, Dua, Cong, as well as several others.
Meeting the kingpins
After a Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper journalist acting in the role of a kidney seller was escorted to Thanh Nga Hotel in Hue City, located in the central region, for a few days, Ha – one of the ring leaders – called to ask Nhat to take the ‘seller’ to a cafeteria on Hai Ba Trung Street on August 15.
Ha was reticent when she met the ‘seller.’
Looking from head to toe, Ha asked the ‘seller’ to have his hair cut and change his clothes to look younger and neater.
She said that a seller may wait for months to sell a kidney, and asked if he accepted this prospect.
Then, she went to an ATM and gave money to Cong to take the ‘seller’ to Central Hue Hospital for a blood test.
After receiving the test results, the ‘seller’ was handed over to Nhat to be taken for another test, called HLA, for white blood cells.
To register for the latter test, Nhat filled in his own telephone number before asking the ‘seller’ to enter a lab for the test.
A week later, the ‘seller’ was required to take a bus from Hue to Hanoi to scan and check the functions of his kidneys at Central Army Hospital 108.
Three days after the kidney test, the ‘seller’ was required to return to Hue for another blood test to check if he matched the recipient.
Luring henchmen
Some of the men who had sold their kidneys to the ring were later asked to work for the group. Dua, 28, from the southern province of Tay Ninh, is one example. He sold his kidney for VND150 million in April.
He was assigned a job to stay with other kidney-sellers in hotels so that they would not run away; distribute money for food every day; and lure new kidney sellers to the ring.
Dua receives VND10 million ($481) as commission for ‘luring a kidney.’
The ring has also established new ‘satellites’ to hunt for sellers in Hai Phong City and Quang Ninh Province in the north, as well as Long An Province and Ho Chi Minh City in the south.
Kidney sellers are paid VND150 million in cash or through a bank transfer as soon as they undergo the operation.
Ha told the ‘seller’ from Tuoi Tre, “Just set your mind at rest. I am responsible and will pay you in full.”
She even named other kidney sellers to prove that she paid them as promised.
Ha asked Khoa to pull up his shirt to show his surgical scar on his left hip, saying that he had undergone an operation to remove his kidney.
To obtain a kidney, a buyer spends VND500-600 million ($24,000-29,000) for the organ. This does not include other costs, such as blood tests and operation fees of VND250-300 million ($12,000-14,400) for a transplant.
The ring has ‘sold’ human kidneys to many overseas Vietnamese and foreigners as well.
A kidney seller named T. said he had sold a kidney via the ring to a Chinese man for VND150 million. However, Tuoi Tre found out that the ring charged the Chinese man VND1 billion ($48,100) in total to transplant a kidney in Vietnam.
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