Although you might think of organ harvesting and trafficking as a far-flung phenomenon, the reality is that it’s a big and growing issue here in the United States.
There are recorded instances of U.S. hospitals advocating premature organ removal, plus cases of U.S. prisoners having their organs sold or donated after they passed away while incarcerated, without the permission of their families.
This study will look into how human remains and organs are trafficked, sold, and misused in the U.S. With 106,732 registered candidates waiting for an organ donation across the country (as of August 26, 2025), there’s plenty of demand – increasingly met by criminal means.
Organ Harvesting And Trafficking: The Disturbing Details
The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 10,000 kidneys are traded on the black market each year. Advertisements for organs – lungs sold for $10,800; bone marrow traded for $1,500 – are posted on social media, and facilitated by cryptocurrency transactions.
Generally speaking, organ trafficking operations exploit the anonymity cryptocurrencies provide and social media’s reach, which makes it challenging for law enforcement to crack down on trafficking networks.
Traditional means of payment are often the weak link when it comes to tracking organ traffickers, an issue circumvented by using digital payment techniques. It’s a factor that the authorities nationwide and in each state will have to closely monitor, with organ transplant and trafficking numbers showing no signs of slowing down.
Organ Trafficking
A total of 144,302 organ transplants were performed globally in 2021. According to Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation (GODT) estimates, around 10% involved illegally acquired organs, which equates to roughly 14,000 organs trafficked in 2021. Organ trafficking ultimately prevails because the demand for organs far exceeds the number of donors.
GODT data tells us that kidneys are by far the most commonly trafficked organs, followed by the liver, heart, lung, and pancreas.
There isn’t enough data to definitively confirm where organ trafficking is most prevalent, but it has been documented in North Africa and the Middle East along migration routes, as well as throughout South Asia. Iran is currently the only country where a donor can legally sell an organ.
In some regions, organ traffickers target vulnerable groups like prisoners or refugees, who make up around 40% of the total trafficked individuals.
In some cases, trafficked individuals are coerced into donating organs in private clinics without any proper medical oversight, resulting in high mortality rates. And organ trafficking happens here, in the U.S.
The First U.S. Case Of Organ Trafficking
The first recorded example of organ trafficking in the U.S. involved Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who brokered the sale of black-market kidneys. Having bought organs from vulnerable people in Israel for $10,000, he then proceeded to sell them to desperate patients in the U.S. for as much as $160,000.
Organ trafficking is an incredibly serious and dangerous criminal activity. It’s also a matter that involves significant sums of money.
Money-Spinning Criminality
Organ trafficking generates between $840 million and $1.7 billion U.S. dollars every year. It’s also estimated that around 10% of all transplants involve illicitly acquired organs.
In 2014, around 120,000 organ transplants were performed worldwide, with approximately 12,000 performed illegally.
Key Illegal Organ Trade Participants
A vendor, recipient, and transplant team, as well as various individuals from the public and private sectors, may be involved in an organ trafficking transaction; brokers are also involved in some cases.
The vast majority of vendors are from developing countries and are poor, uneducated, and desperate – so desperate that the question of illegality is often overlooked. Whereas recipients are generally middle- to high-income individuals from developed countries.
Principal Types of Organ Trafficking
- The traditional kidney brokering model involves the broker recruiting the vendor, recipient, and surgeon.
- The emerging model for kidney transplants involves the recipient recruiting the vendor themselves.
- In most cases, the recipient and vendor will frequently communicate online, through social media and transplant blog sites, but also on the dark web.
- Medical centers that cater to medical tourism are the primary places a broker or recipient can find a surgeon willing to carry out the transplant.
- In the U.S., study data suggest the problem is serious and increasingly widespread.
U.S. Organ Harvesting/Trafficking and Medical Malpractice Cases
- A 2025 investigation into organ trafficking cited interviews with 55 medical workers across 19 states. According to USA Today, one of the medical workers suggested ‘they had witnessed at least one disturbing case of (organ) donation after circulatory death.’
- Such disturbing reports are not isolated examples. The Health Resources and Services Administration recently unearthed some extremely disturbing practices, including the harvesting of organs from living donors. “Our findings show that hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life, which is horrifying,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement.
- An additional report in March revealed further troubling organ trafficking stories. Following an HRSA examination of 351 cases in which organ donation was initially authorized (but not completed), 103 were queried. According to HHS officials, 73 of the patients featured “neurological signs (that were) incompatible” with organ donation, while 28 patients may have been alive while organ extraction was first attempted. Several patients also endured “rushed or premature” attempts to remove their organs, including a 42-year-old woman who was still alive when a surgeon at a small Alabama hospital cut into her chest to discover that her heart was still beating.
- And the case of Hoyos de Baldrich exemplifies the nightmare many families endure due to surreptitious organ theft. Hoyos, 69, was struck by a subway train in Manhattan and subsequently pronounced brain dead on May 9 at Bellevue Hospital, where she had arrived as a Jane Doe. Doctors at NYU Langone Health removed Hoyos’ organs – including her thoracic and abdominal aorta, kidneys, adrenal glands, liver, and gallbladder – without her family’s knowledge or consent. Her family subsequently filed a lawsuit in 2023 that brought new attention to the national organ donor system, which has been struggling to overcome a growing backlog of people who need a transplant.
Members of Hoyos’ family insist that city and hospital officials did not notify them before taking her organs, although identification was in her pocket when she was found and a missing vulnerable adult report had been filed in Nassau County, where Hoyos first disappeared.
Hoyos was not even a registered organ donor – she opposed the practice on religious grounds.
- In Kentucky, a man presumed brain dead woke up during preliminary preparation to have his organs removed. Family members, shocked to discover that their loved one was moving and opening his eyes, initially alerted the doctor in charge of the procedure, who brushed off their concerns as manifestations of reflexes. An hour later, the doctor approached the family in the waiting area to tell them that the procedure had been canceled because the patient “wasn’t ready”; the doctor then explained that the patient “woke up”.
- In May 2025, former Harvard Medical School morgue manager Cedric Lodge pleaded guilty to trafficking stolen human remains across multiple states. Buyers spanned Pennsylvania, Arkansas, and New Hampshire, while DOJ filings revealed sales over $100,000, processed via online platforms and private messaging apps.
Donor Targets And Dwindling Donor Numbers
Beyond the mistreatment of specific individuals, the high demand for organs has led to some highly suspect and widespread business practices.
Former employees at LiveOnNY, the federally designated organ procurement organization for greater New York, have en masse reported the organization for offering incentives to meet donation goals, with bonuses given for meeting thresholds.
- A recent investigative report uncovered a company (and its employees) under significant pressure to find donors, with some patients enduring premature attempts to remove their organs, including some patients who were still alive when organ extractions were attempted.
In light of this news story, the New York Times reported that three leading cardiologists are demanding a “new definition of death” to encourage more organ donations. Such a move adds grist to the mill of those questioning the ethics of some organ procurement practices at a time when donor need far outweighs supply.
Indeed, thousands of Americans have already removed themselves from U.S. organ donor registries as a direct result of the report and other adverse donor procurement news stories.
- Donate Life America, a nonprofit that manages a national donor registry, has recorded a 700% increase in donor registration removals since the investigative report was published, with an average of 412 donor removals per day. AOPO figures suggest that the number was 52 removals per day just a week before the report was published.
- Furthermore, the New York Times coverage prompted more than 2,400 people to remove themselves from donor registries in California, as well as 950 in Florida and more than 600 in Colorado.
Harvested Prisoner Organs
There are also significant problems regarding the removal of U.S. prisoners’ organs. There are currently multiple lawsuits against various prisons, filed by the families of people who died while they were incarcerated: the families allege that their family member’s organs were illegally harvested.
- The Alabama Department of Corrections (ADoC) is currently facing allegations that two agencies conspired to confiscate prisoner organs during autopsies, that they committed fraud while harvesting the organs, and that they gained financially as a result, among other claims.
The ADOC has a contract with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Under the terms of the contract, the university performed autopsies on prisoners who died while in ADOC custody from 2005. In 2018, a group of medical students at the UAB noticed that a significant number of specimens they saw while training were people who’d died while in ADOC custody.
The students subsequently learned about the contract agreement between ADOC and the UAB and that ‘23% of their yearly income comes from Department of Corrections autopsies, and 29% comes from the Alabama Department of Forensic Science’.
The students also learned that the warden had the authority to request autopsies and could set a limit on the scope of an autopsy. According to a UAB doctor, the warden always signed ‘no limitations’ on the prisoner’s autopsy, even where the patient (or the patient’s family) consented to the use of the body for teaching, education, or research.
Lauren Faraino, one of the attorneys filing suit on behalf of the families, had the following to say.
“It is happening in a state where the Department of Corrections is facing a federal lawsuit for constitutional violations. It is happening in a state with the highest death rate in its prisons across the country.
It is happening in a state with the highest overdose rates within the prison system. We are talking about the Department of Corrections, which is doing no correcting, which is doing whatever it wants, which is violating the law left and right, according to the federal government.”
The sheer number of cases involving the horrifying misuse of people’s bodies and the removal of their organs continues to stack up. There’s the Alabama prisoner whose body was returned to his family minus his heart; another was returned to his family minus his brain and other organs. As lawsuits rise in number, an obvious conflict of interest becomes increasingly problematic.
Organ trafficking ultimately prevails because the demand for organs far exceeds the number of donors
The Future Of Organ Donation And Curbing Trafficking
Ultimately, what may once have been considered an overseas issue is in fact a massive problem on U.S. soil. There are now multiple documented cases involving universities, funeral homes, hospitals, and prisons, and their questionable or illegal practices regarding their procurement of organs.
Such a large, often mutually dependent network of nefarious actors demands much closer scrutiny.
With the U.S. home to more than 106,000 people awaiting organ donation, such high demand has meant that many unscrupulous opportunists have made plenty of black-market money.An estimated 10% of all global transplants involve trafficked organs, meaning tens of thousands of organs, often sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In such a market, with such unwavering demand, the issue is unlikely to improve, with the most vulnerable members of society most imperiled by such practices. And with digital means of paying for and organizing the harvesting of organs, any attempt to crack down on the practice may become increasingly difficult to impose.
Policy reform is key: allowing a redefinition of ‘death’ to loosen the rules around organ donation would only worsen public trust, with massive numbers of potential U.S. donors already removing themselves from prospective donor lists.
Some redress will clearly be needed to both restore faith in donor practices and to legally and safely serve those people desperately in need of lifesaving organs.
Yet, with active lawsuits against those abusing (or completely ignoring) the current system, and the seriousness of the matter firmly planted in the American consciousness, there’s the potential for positive, permanent change.
At Anidjar & Levine, we’re medical malpractice experts with a long track record of winning big payouts for our clients. We offer a free consultation, and we never get paid until we win money for you. Call us now to get started.
