Sounds like it’s straight out of Fight Club:

A gang in the remote Peruvian jungle has been killing people for their fat, police charged Thursday, draining it from their corpses and offering it on the black market for use in cosmetics.

The suspects claim there is a black market for it with European cosmetic companies. Most doubt that. But, out of curiosity, what’s the going rate for human fat these days?

Three suspects have confessed to killing five people for their fat, said Col. Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police. He said the suspects, two of whom were arrested carrying bottles of liquid fat, told police it was worth $60,000 a gallon ($15,000 a liter).

Maybe it’s time to start getting creative with America’s obesity problem. If there was a safe way to harvest fat from people outside of liposuction, and you told them you would pay them five figures for it, people would start losing weight like crazy. Unfortunately, the gang members currently use a more invasive technique for harvesting human fat:

…[T]he gang would cut off its victims’ heads, arms and legs, remove the organs, then suspend the torsos from hooks above candles that warmed the flesh as the fat dripped into tubs below.

Any bets on how long before this exact storyline becomes low budget horror flick? We already had ‘Touristas’ that harvested American tourist’s organs in South America. And we’ve had a couple ‘Hostel’ flicks about people killing people for sport and money. Now when you combine them, you get this story. And they can even advertise it to be ‘based on a true story’, making it that much scarier for all those fat little teenagers who go see it.

From the Huffington Post: Gang Killed People For Their Fat