This bedroom was used by young men waiting to donate their kidneys for which they would be paid up to 20,000 yuan ($3,180). The men were sent home after the apartment in Hangzhou was raided Monday. (Photo: CFP)
A staffer with a major online news portal is being credited with helping bust an underground organ transplant syndicate after he spent two weeks posing as someone willing to sell one of his kidneys.
More than two dozen young men who were waiting to sell their kidneys were picked up at a local residential community in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.
A source close to the local police confirmed to the Global Times that a man, surnamed Dong, was arrested by Hangzhou police in Changsha, capital of Hunan Province Tuesday as one of his contracted kidney donors was being taken for a blood test.
The police made the arrests after the news staffer of qq.com blew the whistle on the group's organ transplant operation on Monday.
The staffer, surnamed Ding, told the Global Times that he met Ding Hongqing last month in Foshan, Guangdong Province, who had sold a kidney for 20,000 yuan ($3,180) in February.
Ding then went undercover and contacted an online buyer of human kidneys, who arranged for him to meet Dong in Hangzhou where donors are tested and wait for their surgery.
On May 14, Ding, the QQ staffer, and eight other donors from Jiangxi, Hunan, Gansu and Zhejiang provinces arrived at a five-room apartment in a residential community in Hangzhou's Jianggan district.
Dong offered the men 35,000 yuan if their kidney is matched with a recipient. They were promised the money would be wired to their accounts half an hour before their kidney was to be surgically removed.
Ding said over the next two weeks he met some 20 donors who were all poorly-educated young people from rural areas. Two of the donors were eventually sent to Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province for surgery, two went to Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province and two had their surgery in Jinan, capital of East China's Shandong Province.
"A young donor named Wang Jun from Jiangxi Province said he had to sell a kidney because he was unemployed and needed to pay his credit card bills," Ding said.
"Twenty-four contracts with donors were found at the apartment. Each contained the donor's name, fingerprint and ID number," Ye Dun, a reporter from the Hangzhou-based Zhejiang Television Station who attended the raid Monday, told the Global Times Tuesday.
"The youngest donor was 18 years old, the oldest was 29 and all signed contracts in May. We don't know how many more donors may have been processed through this place," Ye added.
Local police in Hangzhou told the Global Times Tuesday that after questioning the potential donors, their families were asked to pick them up.
In China, roughly a million patients live on kidney dialysis every year and are in need of a kidney transplant. Fewer than 4,000 legal transplants were performed last year, according to the Shanghai-based newspaper Oriental Morning Post.
A black market kidney transplant costs between 300,000 to 500,000 yuan, Ding told the Global Times.
