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The Sun newspaper has a powerful story about desperate Brits offering their organs for sale online (). But it doesn't take much to track down people wanting to sell organs as the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Katie Law found out, they'll beat a path to your blog. Katie is one of three writers for science blog, Inky Circus. was rapidly innundated with comments like the one below from people purporting to be selling organs:

MY FATHER IS 65 YEARS OLD,LOCATED IN INDIA, BANGALORE. MY FATHER IS GOING TO SELL OF ONE OF HIS KIDNEY FOR MY HIGHER STUDIES. WE ARE IN URGENT NEED OF MONEY NOW. ANY ONE WHO IS IN NEED OF KIDNEY PLEASE CONTACT ME. MY MOBILE NO.IS [deleted]

Now there's not an easy way to tell if the people leaving messages are genuine or scammers. You'd need to contact them individually and begin a long and difficult process of verifying their stories. But two things are clear: if they are scammers then there's clearly enough desperate people out there in need of organs for these people to think this kind of activity is worthwhile, if they are genuine it shows how desperate the sellers are.

I wonder if Katie's experience is unusual. Have any others had similar experiences with these kind of comments? Let us know.