There’s fraud even on Everest
Dozens of Mount Everest guides have been accused of poisoning foreign climbers as part of a scheme to create emergencies and collect millions in insurance money.
Nepal Police’s Central Investigation Bureau reportedly uncovered the $20 million insurance fraud scam in 2018, but recently reopened the investigation.
Guides would allegedly create emergencies for tourists from countries like the U.K. or Australia, where it would be more difficult for insurance companies to verify incidents in the Kathmandu area of Nepal, the Kathmandu Post reported.
Authorities say guides would wait for climbers to experience mild altitude sickness, and then urge the climbers to take acetazolamide tablets, which treat altitude sickness, albeit with “excessive” amounts of water that would worsen symptoms. In one case, a guide was accused of mixing baking powder into a climber’s food to bring on similar symptoms. In both cases, the guides would then call for a helicopter to extract the sickened climbers.
Another method described by the Kathmandu Post involved the guides working together with climbers, and telling them to fake an illness so they wouldn’t have to descend the mountain on foot.
Helicopter companies, local hospitals and more remote hospitals were also alleged to be part of the scam, as guides had reportedly falsified the need for emergency helicopter evacuations and additional treatment.
The Kathmandu Post reported that Era International Hospital took in more than $15.87 million and Shreedhi International Hospital received more than $1.22 million in connection with falsified rescue operations.
Services including Mountain Rescue Service allegedly carried out 171 unnecessary rescues, collecting $10.31 million; Nepal Charter Service allegedly collected $8.2 million; and Everest Experience and Assistance was linked to $11.04 million in international insurance claims, the outlet reported.
Sound sort of familiar?
Everest has become big business – and can fraud be far behind? Apparently not.
There are even allegations of poisoning, although not fatal poisoning – just the baking soda sort of thing. But talk about betrayal! People depend on these guides for their lives.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but …
There’s a long, sad history of the mistreatment of sherpas by Western climbers and the climbing industry.
________________________________
Review: Sherpa by Jennifer Peedom — The death of 16 Sherpas on Everest in 2014 went almost unnoticed by foreign climbers. But the tragedy helped the long-mistreated Nepalese guides to find their voice.
https://www.huckmag.com/article/sherpa-documentary-majestic-revealing-importance
huxley:
I’m not so sure about “almost unnoticed.” I certainly read coverage of it at the time.
The climbers spend $50,000 to $150,000 to do this so the Nepalese are picking the right people to take advantage of.
“Nothing personal, strictly business.”
This is so, so amusing.
There’s a YouTube channel, “The Last Climb,” which specializes in stories such as:
–The Last Climb, “This Karen MOCKED a Sherpa. She Died After.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_8NmcYSyKY
However, these are stories, usually about an arrogant Western woman, with an improbable name, in this case Marabel Knox Ellery, climbing beyond her capacity and ignoring the sherpa guides.
It’s a satisfying narrative for many viewers. However, Marabel Knox Ellery doesn’t exist and neither do the arrogant climbers in the other videos I’ve checked.
Certainly, such things have happened, but this is another AI slop channel. I am noticing more and more of them. Most of the commenters are taken in.
I find this disconcerting.
Bring your own guide. No locals can ever be trusted, for any purpose.
> There’s a long, sad history of the mistreatment of sherpas by Western climbers and the climbing industry.
If you think the market mistreats you, leave the market.
If you think the industry mistreats you, leave the industry.
huxley:
AI has gotten extremely common on YouTube, and the most disturbing thing is that it seems to fool the majority of viewers.
I would imagine that climbing Everest would be, for most people, the achievement of a lifetime. I wonder how it would feel to find out such a commitment and effort was leveraged using baking soda, so a bunch of pedestrian dweebs could effect an insurance scam. Geez. Training to be tough enough to survive conquering Everest, only to be laid low and played as a chump, for fraud. That would hurt.
Re: AI slop on the internet, youtube and X.
I am trying to hold on to some Christian charity here, but dayum, some people are frickin’ idiots.
If it sounds ridiculous and improbable – it is!
I operate under the Miss Marple principle;
‘I don’t believe anything anyone tells me. I haven’t for years.’
I read about this in Outside. It’s not actually climbers, it’s hikers. So they’re not climbing Mt. Everest. So, their not paying the tens of thousands of dollars to climb Mt. Everest and they’re not part of those expeditions. They’re hiking MAYBE to base camp. And it is mostly NOT on Everest. One story the article related was about a young women who had an honest person suggest she hike down instead. She preferred to be helicoptered down. The idiocy of the victims doesn’t excuse there fraud. But i think it makes it more understandable.
Personally, I make it a point to stay away from places where the roadmarks are named things like “Green Boots”, “Rainbow Valley” and “Sleeping Beauty”. They might sound like they’re in Disneyland, but they’re actually climbers’ corpses which have never decomposed in the thin air of Everest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Boots
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Corrupt?
Probably just angling for jobs in The Hotel California…
huxley, that was amusing. I’m supposing Marabel Knox Ellery was a composite, like New York magazine does.
— BJ
I once saw an interview with an Everest climber who had dreamed of doing it for years, saved up to do it, and climbed it, and it Went Seriously Wrong. His advice for anyone considering it was a simple “don’t go”.
There’s a saying: “Happy people don’t climb mountains.” I’ve pondered that many times over the years, I think it embodies much more than what it appears to say, good things and bad things.
Hilary, the man who first reached the peak of Everest, was reported afterward to have said something close to: ‘If the mountain was 1000 feet lower, it would have been scaled in the 1920s. If it was 1000 feet higher, it would have been purely an engineering issue.’ That is, what kind of vehicle would you need.
Everest is right on the razor’s edge of what human beings can do without being totally protected from their environment.