At Everest, helicopter rescue fraud preying on trekkers
KATHMANDU, Nepal — When Geoffrey Chang, an Australian trekker heading to Mount Everest Base Camp, woke up with chest pain, his Nepali guide pushed immediately for a medical evacuation, saying he had a serious case of acute mountain sickness.
But the next morning, Chang was feeling better, and his oxygen levels had come back to acceptable levels, he said. His travel companion, Michelle Tjondro, asked the guide if they could simply rest that day or walk down like others with similar symptoms. That’s when the red flags started to pile up. The guide pushed aside those suggestions, continuing to press for a costly helicopter evacuation. Afterward, at a hospital marketed to foreigners in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, Chang’s passport was confiscated for several days, he said, and as the bill rose, a doctor told him his symptoms would need to be exaggerated in order to have insurance pay for his stay.
Chang and Tjondro, and the insurance company they booked with, now all believe they were the target of a scam that has corroded Nepal’s tourism industry and sucked huge sums of money from insurance companies.
The Nepalese government and trek insurance companies describe a wave of fraud in which Mount Everest trek operators, guides, helicopter evacuation companies and hospitals are conspiring to bilk insurance companies by encouraging unneeded evacuations and exaggerating medical symptoms and services.
Officials said that as of June, they had flagged millions of dollars’ worth of potentially fraudulent insurance claims this year.
Guides earn handsome commissions from disreputable trekking operators by pushing for emergency evacuations in cases of mild acute mountain sickness and other illnesses, dissuading trekkers from contacting doctors or from trying less drastic measures. In some cases, they say, healthy trekkers even have agreed to a rescue in exchange for a free ride off the trail.
Nepal’s government announced a new monitoring program late last week to crack down on the fraud. Rabindra Adhikari, Nepal’s minister for tourism, said in an interview that new procedures had been set up for medical evacuations, and that helicopter companies, trekking operators and hospitals must now submit invoices for rescues to his office to ensure that they are “genuine.”
Nepali officials said they were also investigating claims that guides in some cases had purposely made clients sick to force an evacuation, reportedly through serving spoiled food or mixing large amounts of baking soda into meals.
Insurance companies have had enough, too. They have raised premiums, posted red-banded advisories on their websites warning trekkers of the scam, or sometimes threatened to end coverage entirely in the country.
Phil Sylvester, a spokesman for World Nomads, a popular insurance provider with clients around the globe, said the number of unnecessary rescues was rising. In one recent example, Sylvester said, a man was air-evacuated for an earache.
“I personally have seen 200 to 250 suspect evacuation cases in a year from a handful of insurers,” he said. “With each evacuation costing $6,000 to $10,000, that adds up.”
The problem has become extensive enough that World Nomads recently put together an internal blacklist of Nepali helicopter companies and hospitals that it suspects of fraud. Sylvester said claims involving a blacklisted company were not automatically rejected. Trekkers, he said, “have no control over who gets called on the phone.”