In-the-Wild (organ) harvest?

Being a guitarist, I’ve never really devoted much time to organ harvesting. (Sorry: I never could resist a pun, the worse the better.) In fact, there’s a long-standing urban myth about people in the US being drugged and waking up to find themselves in a bath of ice minus one of their kidneys, which has inspired several books/stories, movies and TV programmes. (Snopes, a site which is very informative on hoaxes and semi-hoaxes and which is also not averse to the occasional pun, has an article on the subject called You’ve Got to Be Kidneying.)

Of course, I’m not saying that organ harvesting never happens. There are obviously mechanisms for organ donation, whether it’s for close relatives or complete strangers. In fact, it’s quite common in some countries for people to sell their own organs, and I certainly wouldn’t claim that no-one has ever had an organ removed without their permission or knowledge. However, it tends to be quite difficult to verify stories of such misappropriation in the US or Europe, though there are reported links with human trafficking. And that’s not funny at all.

Still, I can’t help chuckling at this Art of Trolling post concerning an invitation to participate. Joke or social engineering? I think probably the former.

Hat tip to Kurt Wismer for calling it to my attention on his Security Memetics blog.

David Harley
Small Blue-Green World