Mount Everest guides accused of poisoning foreign climbers as part of scam
Guides on Mount Everest have been accused of secretly poisoning foreign climbers, encouraging them to rely on expensive aerial evacuations in a recently exposed $20 million insurance fraud scheme.
As per The Independent, amid the ongoing investigation by the Nepali police, a total of 32 people have been charged, and 11 arrests have been made so far.
Reportedly, 4,782 international climbers have been impacted by the scam between 2022 and 2025.
Nepali police have confirmed that over 300 cases of fake rescues have been uncovered so far; this has totalled to nearly $20 million charged to climbers and insurers as a result of the faux illness.
Foreign climbers, who are already at high risk of altitude sickness, were reportedly fed food containing baking powder to engender similar symptoms.
They were then encouraged to use the emergency helicopter evacuations as guides would stress their illness was a life-or-death situation.
From there, tourists would allegedly be transported to specific hospitals where diagnoses were exaggerated, or entirely fabricated. In some cases, climbers were given unnecessary treatments to hike up costs.
The scam allegedly ran deep and has led the police to a network of falsified documents, which manipulated flight records and invoices to support insurance claims.
This ongoing scam first came to light in 2019, whereby a 700-page report was produced by the government promising that the tourism industry would reform accordingly. Nonetheless, the scam persisted.
In 2019, it was also revealed that a handful of foreign visitors would insert themselves in the middle of the scam and would agree to feign acute mountain sickness for a helicopter rescue in return for cut-price expeditions.
A police spokesperson attributed the scheme’s longevity to inadequate enforcement, sharing with local media that “the scam continued due to lax punitive action” and had “tainted the country’s image”.