You can hear a lot lately in the world of adoption about women, many not even expectant mothers at all, posing as potential birthparents in order to scam hopeful adoptive couples. You might even have heard about adoptive couples who scam young women posing as prepared and screened when they are in fact not approved for adoption and want to conduct matters under the radar of proper adoption laws. How much however have you heard about adoption agencies and other seeming “professionals” becoming the actual scam artists? While there do not appear to be many people collecting information about how this occurs and what those who have been taken advantage of (both birthparents and adoptive parents) can do about it, I can assure you I believe it happens with more frequency than most of us know. While I cannot divulge names or identifying information I can share some of the details of the times it has occurred to me and those I know and just why this rates as “scam” behavior in my book.

Of course, like many, our family did experience the traditional perceived notion of a scam once. We met with a young woman who answered our add, someone interested in us taking her Christmas shopping and gifting her money. We had no proof she was pregnant (and later found she never was), and we refused to give her anything other than the treat of our initial meeting dinner in the way of “gifts.” She would not meet our attorney or Dr. To confirm pregnancy and that gave us the red flag we needed to say well best of luck to you because this will not work for us. The other times we found ourselves taken advantage of or scammed were not so obvious to others or us at the time, much of the reason here was that we were working with an adoption professional (although we were never signed with an agency) and we expected a level of ethical behavior because of it.

The first occasion was when we were seeking to adopt a second child. We had our home study done with a private social worker and were working with several networking professionals to locate a potential birthparent or baby. One of the ways I networked was to contact adoption agencies directly and make our wish to accept hard to place situations known. We received several calls back from agency directors about situations they had no match for in their pool of adopting parents. One call came at a time when we were also about to contract with a separate referral service , which is a service that does that very same thing. They sign adoption agencies and when the agency cannot match a potential placement the referral service turns to their own (often wider) pool of clients to help them locate a match. Usually a fee is paid out of your adoption fees to the referral service for the successful referral. I know this type of service can work as we used a different service (one I would recommend) to locate and adopt our son. What I did not know at the time was that the particular referral service we were about to sign up with had a new contract with an adoption agency who had called us directly about a situation. We spoke to the agency director and agreed to several conference calls with an incarcerated expectant mother in another state. The calls went very well and the young woman let the agency director and our family know that this was a match. We were hopeful and excited! Then came an interesting call from the new referral service.

As I came in the door that night the phone was ringing, I knew who is was, it was my expected call from the young mother who had selected us to adopt her baby boy, due soon. I was however wrong, it was actually the new referral service director calling to tell us that the expectant mom had selected another family. I was in shock, it wasn't until much later when I found out other details and realized that we had been scammed. . .


Continued in Part Two