The Cruelest Con

These sleazeballs prey on couples eager to adopt.

Emotionally Crushed

A couple of years ago, Belinda Ramirez read an Internet adoption listing from Laura and Anthony Valois, a young New York couple who had been trying in vain to have their first child. Ramirez quickly contacted them from her home in Corpus Christi, Texas, telling them they could adopt her unborn baby. Excited, Laura and Anthony spent weeks communicating with Ramirez. They got regular updates on her pregnancy and even listened on the phone to what they were told was the baby's heartbeat on a fetal monitor.

Before long, Ramirez began asking them for financial support, like rent money. That took the Valoises by surprise. But they were willing to do a lot to ensure a smooth birth, including sending more than $1,000 to Ramirez over several months. Laura and Anthony finally drove to Texas so they could be on hand for the birth. But once they arrived, Ramirez gave them the runaround, avoiding their daily phone calls. After three weeks, the couple drove back to New York -- empty-handed and emotionally crushed.

They later learned Ramirez had been bilking about ten other people, in states ranging from California to Ohio to Florida, for such things as Wal-Mart gift cards that she said she needed for prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. From start to finish, it was a scam. In fact, Ramirez was never even pregnant. In January she was sentenced to 24 months in prison without parole on charges of mail and wire fraud.

"When you find out you can't have children, it's just devastating," Laura Valois told a Texas TV station. "But when somebody intentionally does this to you, it's 15 times worse."

This is one of the lowest scams around, masterminded by sleazy people who rip off couples looking to open their hearts and homes to an unwanted child. These swindlers target victims of an adoption system that can be so invasive, demanding, expensive and slow that the idea of bypassing the red tape is almost irresistible.

Advocates like Lee Allen of the National Council for Adoption (NCFA) stress that the process ensures legitimate adoptions are safe and well supervised. That's absolutely true. Still, adoption laws and standards vary from state to state, and can open the door to predators and scam artists. "The adoption industry operates with less regulation and consumer protection than your neighborhood health club," says Trish Maskew of Ethica, a nonprofit that promotes "ethical adoptions."

For Love, Not Money

That helps explain a scam that turned up in the Chicago area last year. Bill and Debra Klima spent seven months scamming thousands of dollars in free rent and other cash payments from adoption agencies to which they promised to give a child. One couple looked at ultrasound images of the baby and even went bowling with the Klimas. The racket came to light only when two people working for separate adoption agencies ran into each other and learned they were both helping the Klimas pay their rent.

Then there are scams involving the actual delivery of real children to adoptive parents. A Hawaiian woman named Lauryn Galindo worked as an adoption "facilitator," connecting would-be parents with children for a fee that usually ran over $10,000 per child. In Hawaii, as in many states, facilitators are not licensed, nor do they need special training. From 1997 to 2001, Galindo arranged some 800 adoptions of supposed Cambodian orphans in the United States -- and got rich along the way, living in a $1.4 million home and driving a Jaguar.

But Galindo's life in the fast lane came to a screeching halt when some of her adoptive parents discovered their children weren't orphans at all. The kids had living parents back in Cambodia. Even more shocking, some had sold their babies for as little as $15. One American parent later said her blood ran cold as she read a newspaper article about a Cambodian mother who'd been coerced into giving up her baby -- and realized it was her newly adopted son, Sam. In November 2004, Galindo was sentenced to 18 months in prison for visa fraud and money laundering.

Cambodia is now closed to U.S. adoptions, but that leaves other hunting grounds for the slimeballs of the adoption trade. A recent 135-count federal indictment against Utah adoption agency Focus on Children alleges it tricked parents in the island nation of Samoa into giving up dozens of children for adoption by Americans. Birth parents who speak poor English reportedly signed away legal rights to their children without realizing what they were doing. (The agency's owners, who allegedly made hundreds of thousands of dollars, have denied the charges.)

Clearly we need more checks and safeguards over the adoption process. The United States has taken more than ten years to implement an international treaty imposing minimum standards on overseas adoptions, including a requirement that adoptions can be made only through officially accredited agencies. Those regulations are supposed to go into effect next year but won't include a number of popular adoption countries, like Vietnam, that haven't signed on to it.

Here at home, 12 states have taken a step that others should emulate: They forbid anyone other than state agencies and licensed businesses from advertising adoption services, whether on websites or in newspapers. Facilitators should also be licensed by the state to ensure they understand adoption laws and procedures. And, according to NCFA's Lee Allen, couples would be wise to hire an adoption attorney, and they should never use the Internet to adopt directly from a mother.

Above all, let's remember how joyous adoption can be, and take heart from people like Bob Temple and his wife, Alette Coble-Temple. This California couple spent a year trying to become parents before falling for the ruse of an Oregon woman who took thousands from them on the false promise they could adopt her unborn daughter.

But the story didn't end there. Another Oregon woman, eight months pregnant, had been thinking about giving up her baby. After watching a TV news story about Bob and Alette's case, she patted her belly and said to her unborn child, "I found your family." The adoption of Kathryn Taylor Temple went through without a hitch. The birth mother had just one request: She wanted her daughter to know that she had given her up out of love, not for money. If only everyone thought that way.