UN Didn't Release an Organ Trafficking Alert
The Claim
The UN released an alert on organ trafficking in the Middle East done through fake foreign job agencies.
News posted on
Emerging story
Social media posts on Twitter and Facebook as well as an online news publication are circulating an organ trafficking alert from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The posts warn readers to beware of “fake foreign agencies” particularly in the Middle East that promise “high paying jobs” especially to Africans that organ trafficking is on the rise. Posts are accompanied by an image seemingly released by the UNODC, with their logo on the top.
The claim circulating urges readers to share the alert in order to save lives. Included at the end of the post is a link, possibly to the alert on the UNODC website.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbars investigation found the claims to be false. Firstly, the claim's link does not exist and resulted in an error 404, as seen in the screenshot below.
The Misbar team searched the UNODC website and official social media sites and could not find the alert. Moreover, this is not the first time the same claim circulates. In April 2019, a similar claim was released from the International Migration Office (IMO) under the UN, as can be seen here and here.
The article quoted Ikechukwu Attah, Nigeria’s country officer of the IMO, who later refuted the claim on BBC Pidgin, saying that he is shocked to have been quoted and that the news was fake. Therefore, given that nothing was found through official UN channels and that a near-identical claim had been previously refuted, the Misbar team finds it fake.
