Indian Man Scams Over 200 People Posing as a COVID-19 Plasma Donor
July 22, 2020This article originally appeared on VICE India
On Monday, Police in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad arrested a man after it was alleged he'd scammed over 200 people by posing as a COVID-19 plasma donor.
When a person recovers from COVID-19 their body produces special proteins known as antibodies, which gives them a much stronger resistance to reinfection. These antibodies can then be used to treat severe cases of COVID-19 in other patients, via a transferral of blood plasma. This makes blood plasma from recovered patients a proven but temporary treatment for COVID, which has driven plasma prices sky high—and naturally created a thriving black market. In some cases, 400 ml of plasma has traded for rates as high as INR 300,000 (US$4,000).
Sandeep Reddy, 25, a resident of the Srikakulam district of the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, presented himself online as recovered COVID-19 patient, hoodwinking vulnerable families by claiming that he was able to donate plasma. In some cases, he also pretended to sell antiviral drugs or the immunosuppressive drug Tocilizumab.
Reddy targeted desperate families by first asking them to transfer him about INR 5,000 ($67) for his travel expenses. Once the transfer was done, Reddy wouldn't show up and would instead try to extract more money.
Since the people he duped were busy taking care of ailing family members, they often didn't file police reports, but instead took their grievances to Twitter where they tagged Hyderabad's cyber crime police department.
According to a statement from the city's Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police G Chakravarthy, Reddy had been only recently released from jail, after he was convicted of two counts of theft in the south Indian city of Visakhapatnam. Although Reddy completed a course in computer hardware networking, he claimed that unemployment had pushed him to crime.
But Reddy isn’t the only one taking advantage of the pandemic to earn a quick buck.
In June, a man named Abdul Karim alias Rahul Thakur was accused of scamming the Assembly Speaker of the national capital city Delhi. He followed a similar Modus Operandi to Reddy’s, meaning that he'd contact families in need, then disappearing or switch numbers after they'd transferred him money.
As early as February, a 27-year-old photographer in Hyderabad was caught scamming people and reportedly collected at least INR 50,000 ($670) under the pretence of creating a network of plasma donors.
On July 17, a list of plasma donors that went viral throughout social media in Hyderabad was revealed as fake. Another blood donors’ list from 2015 was mistakenly shared by social media users in Mumbai and Delhi in recent few days.
With 402,529 active cases and more than 724,577 recoveries, India has a recovery rate of 62.72 percent, according to the Health Ministry. India is currently the third worst-affected country when it comes to COVID-19, with a total 1,155,191 confirmed cases and 28,084 casualties.
Follow Shamani Joshi on Instagram.
