A viral message has continued to spread across social media pages, especially WhatsApp, that the United Nations has issued an organ trafficking alert. According to the broadcast message with an image attached, titled “Organ Trafficking; UNITED NATIONS ALERT,” the message reads that “This is from UN alert system. Let’s share and warn others. You may save a life.
According to the viral message, various human parts were being sold in a booming market in the Middle East under the guise of promising and processing travel documents for the victims to work Abroad.
Claim: The United Nations issued an organ trafficking alert
Verification:
The CDD War Room combed through the social media pages of the United Nations (UN) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and found no report of such claim or alert. This prompted us to conduct further investigation.
We checked the URL attached to the broadcast message and found the “page or document not found.”
The CDD War Room used Wayback Machine to search for the URL attached to the claim “https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/organized-crime/intro/emerging-crimes/organ-trafficking.html.” We found five pages with similar URLs.
The pages with similar content, uploaded on the UNODC website, archived and retrieved using the Wayback Machine dated November 2017, December 2017, July 2018 and January 2021.
A look at the contents of these archived web pages showed that none of them were travel alerts. Some of the archived pages can be accessed here and here.
We found that these web pages contained reports released by the UNODC and titled “Emerging Crimes” and “Organ Trafficking.” In these web pages, there was no place where price tags were attached to human organs, nor was the Middle East described as a booming black market for human parts, as contained in the broadcast message.
In addition, the CDD War Room found that the broadcast message with the attached message was first circulated online in July 2021. The “United Nations Alert” was first shared by an X user (formerly Twitter) whose account has now been suspended.
Therefore, we can confirm that the broadcast message did not emanate from the United Nations (UN) or the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Verdict: FALSE
The CDD War Room can confirm that the United Nations did not issue the organ trafficking alert. We found that the broadcast message titled “United Nations Alert” does not emanate from the UN or the UNODC.The broadcast message was first shared by an X (Twitter user) in July 2021 and the link attached to the message could not be found on the World Wide Web.