Nepalese authorities say Everest guides, helicopter companies, and hospitals ran a $20 million insurance scam—allegedly poisoning climbers to trigger costly helicopter evacuations.
Mount Everest guides are among a wide range of actors in Nepal’s mountaineering industry that have been accused of poisoning foreign climbers without their knowledge to collect insurance payouts for expensive evacuations from the world’s highest mountain.
Some 32 people have been charged, and 11 arrests have been made in the investigation by Nepal’s police service. Police uncovered evidence of a pervasive scam involving workers throughout the country’s mountaineering industry, with sherpas, company owners, helicopter pilots, and hospital administrators all accused of being part of the scam.
The scam affected over 4,700 international visitors between 2022 and 2025, with some 300 fake rescues accounting for nearly $20 million in rescue expenses charged to insurance companies—or in some cases directly to the climbers themselves.
Among the first to be arrested were six individuals from mountaineering tour companies and emergency rescue providers in late January. Police say the six had claimed insurance payouts for fake rescues of foreign tourists who they said had fallen ill on the mountain.
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Also charged are operators and staff from three helicopter companies: Mountain Helicopters, Manang Air (since rebranded as Basecamp Helicopters), and Altitude Air. It has also charged physicians and administrators from Swacon International Hospital, Shreedhi International Hospital, and Era International Hospital. Several of those charged who were not arrested were said to have fled the country.
Nepal’s police investigators said the guides used a number of methods to force unnecessary and costly mountain rescue operations via helicopter. They say the guides laced climbers’ food with baking powder, which simulated stomach ailments that are commonly associated with altitude sickness. Other climbers were given medications that caused excess water in the digestive system to produce similar symptoms.
Once the visitors reported nausea, dizziness, or muscle aches as a result of the poisoning, they were advised by the mountaineering guides to evacuate via helicopter. Operators would also bill insurance companies for multiple helicopter flights, even in situations where multiple climbers were accommodated on a single flight. Working in concert with helicopter companies and hospital administrators, police say the ring created fake flight records and forged medical documents to support insurance claims. In some cases, the climbers were not even on helicopter flights and had not actually received care from the hospitals.
Guides also suggested faking illnesses directly to climbers who didn’t want to walk back (the round-trip trek to the Everest Base Camp takes two weeks). The climbers would say they were ill, and the guides would request emergency services to transport them down the mountain. In more severe cases, guides overstated the effects of mild cases of altitude sickness and recommended evacuation to trekkers who could easily have been treated with over-the-counter medication.
In some cases, investigators used CCTV footage from the hospitals named in the insurance claims to find that patients who were said to be receiving treatments in critical care units were instead drinking beer in the hospital cafeteria.
Similar scams were first reported in 2018, which prompted a wide-reaching government investigation and promises of reforms and oversight for mountaineering companies on Everest, which draws a significant number of visitors to the country each year. The chief of Nepal’s police investigative service Manoj Kumar told the Kathmandu Post that the scams had been able to regroup and continue because of “lax punitive action” from the Nepalese government.
Travel insurance companies, which had reviewed the possibility of suspending coverage for trips to Nepal after the 2018 report, will almost certainly take a closer look at removing the country from their insurance plans. If they continue covering trips to Nepal, it could be at significantly increased premiums.
Mount Everest accounts for a significant portion of Nepal’s tourism industry, with up to 40,000 visitors making the trek to the Everest Base Camp each year, most during the peak trekking and climbing season of April and May. As many as 800 will successfully summit the 29,000-foot mountain. The mountain has grown increasingly polluted because of the number of visitors, and Nepalese authorities have begun requiring trekkers to haul out trash as a condition for their visit permits.
Kumar doesn’t mince words when asked how the scam could have come back to life, even after a lengthy investigative report by a local newspaper and government promises to crack down on the scammers, which the Post referred to as “not a few rogue actors, but a structured, commission-based network”. “When there is no action against crime, it flourishes,” said Kumar. “The insurance scam too flourished as a result.”