Nepal’s fake mountain rescue fraud

Six travel and mountain rescue executives have been arrested and accused of conducting fake rescues on Nepal’s high mountains to scam millions of dollars from insurance companies.

The arrests come as the South Asian nation tries to strengthen its economy by boosting the number of tourists climbing and trekking in its mountainous provinces.

Rescue racket 

Every year, thousands of climbers travel to Nepal to “scale the highest Himalayan mountains”, and tens of thousands more arrive to “hike the mountain trails” that lead up to “the base camps of these high peaks”, said The Associated Press.
The terrain, and the weather, can be unforgiving and, each year, several climbers die and hundreds are rescued, “suffering from extreme exhaustion, altitude sickness or other medical issues”. With “few roads and limited medical facilities” in the mountains, rescuers often have to “charter expensive helicopter flights” to take patients to hospitals in Kathmandu.

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This is where the trouble begins. In a series of insurance scams worth a total of $20 million (£14.6 million), tour operators and rescue services have been faking documents and submitting false claims for medical emergencies that involved expensive helicopter evacuations from remote trekking areas. This large-scale fraud has “badly tarnished Nepal’s image as a tourist destination”, said The Kathmandu Post.

There were similar problems in 2018 but the government said it had clamped down on the “fake rescue racket” by eliminating all “intermediaries” involved in arranging emergency evacuation services for trekkers and mountaineers. Ministers also made tour operators legally responsible for their clients from the start to the end of a trip.

Fabricated invoices

But, eight years on, the fake rescue scams haven’t stopped; in fact they’ve grown, according to Nepal Police. Its Central Investigation Bureau arrested six people from three separate travel and mountain rescue operators, accusing them of submitting fake but successful claims for close to $20 million between 2022 and 2025. All six are Nepali nationals.

The fake documents included manipulated passenger and cargo manifests for helicopter rescue flights, and fabricated or altered medical invoices and hospital reports. And the numbers are high: 171 of the 1,248 rescues claimed by one company were fake, leading to unjustified payouts of more than $10 million (£7.3 million). Another company is accused of fabricating 75 of 471 claimed rescues, and fraudulently claiming $8 million (£5.8 million), while a third is accused of making 71 fake claims with payouts totalling over $1 million (£741,000).

Meanwhile, Nepal is busy boosting its tourist climbing sector. It has made 97 of its Himalayan mountains free to climb for the next two years, in a bid to encourage climbers to its more remote areas, generating jobs and income for locals. It’s not clear if there are plans to improve infrastructure in these areas or if the local communities will be able to cope with an influx of climbers.