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General Discussion / Re: The fake baby Instagram adoption scam
« on: March 30, 2020, 06:49:06 PM »
And the same scammer has remained active. Since March, Juli says, she and her colleagues have been called by families from Georgia, Colorado, Texas, Alaska, New York, Minnesota, Alabama, Illinois, and Utah. All of the families were approached on Instagram by a young woman from Georgia. "The emotional scams took me when I was younger completely off-guard," says Dawn Smith Pleiner, who has run the Vermont-based Friends in Adoption agency for nearly four decades.
Long before the arrival of the internet, women would call for "hour-long-talking-with-your-best-friend conversations", she says, and it was "never ever to do with money -never". "Then you realise that the due date is long gone, and you're still talking. There are so many lonely people out in this world today that just want some attention."
It's a scam that's hard to prosecute. Most states still don't have legal tools. Since September 2018 there have been laws in place in Georgia to stop financial adoption fraud, but not the emotional kind. "It's very frustrating," says Juli Wisotsky.
One option could be to raise a civil case for intentional infliction of emotional distress. "But, does somebody want to get involved in a lawsuit for that?" she asks. "Or do they just want to let it go and try to heal and grieve what is a loss to them? Even though there was no baby there, they thought there was a baby. It's grief."
Traumatised couples regularly report this scam to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Centre. In a statement, the FBI told the BBC that although they were aware of emotional adoption scams, these were still uncommon. None of the parents have received a follow-up call. But it's not only the potential parents who have been hurt, but there's also another person too. Because Ashley isn't just a fake Instagram profile, cobbled together from some images and an active imagination. Ashley is a real 22-year-old, who lives in Georgia. Her name is Ashley King and her identity has been stolen. Sam, playing detective, finds Ashley's profile easily - the pictures are all public. She messages her to warn her that her photographs are being used to trick people. And she points out that whoever runs the fake Instagram accounts knows intimate details about her life, her husband and her baby. Ashley's voice lowers as she describes the shock of seeing photos of her newborn child on another person's Instagram account. "The woman had loads of people thinking that they were going to adopt my daughter," she says. "It's a really scary thought. Why would someone do that?"
She immediately files a report with Gwinnett County Police. What the scammer says about Ashley's childhood is completely false, she explains, but when it comes to her daughter the impostor even knows what hospital she was born in. "King stated the only information that was incorrect on her daughter was that she was listed as being born prematurely at 2lb 8oz when in reality she was born at 2lb 12oz," reads the police report.
"All other information was correct."
Sam thinks it's likely that the fake Ashley knows the real one. "I don't live in a very big town but if you picked a random woman out of my town and expected me to know her life story, I wouldn't know it," she says. "You would only know those details if you actually knew someone."
But Ashley has no idea who it might be, and this makes her nervous. "Now I have to look over my shoulder making sure this woman isn't watching my kid because she knows about where I lived," she says. "It's really scary." (Ashley and her family have since moved house.)
Georgia has a law on identity theft, but it's debatable whether it is applicable in this case. A few states have already passed legislation to tackle online impersonation, but prosecutions may not succeed if no money has changed hands. Who can put a value on a broken heart?
Gwinnett County Police say they are not currently investigating. It must be hard for the scammer to remember exactly what she has said to different couples. When Sam is first contacted it's by someone pretending to be 16 years old. But a month later, Ashley says she will get her dad to call the adoption attorney "since I am only 15".
The scammer tells another couple that her middle name is Lorraine. Later, they suggest Olivia Lorraine as a potential name for the baby. She then replies, "Olivia is my middle name! Sounds perfect to us!"
But these are not her biggest mistakes. To call or text hopeful parents, the scammer uses non-fixed Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone numbers, the technical name for calls that go over the internet, created through companies such as Google or Skype. These numbers require very little information on sign-up, making them difficult to trace. But just occasionally she gets careless. One of the numbers used to contact Juli and Kristen isn't an internet number. It's a real mobile number, from Georgia, and registered to someone called Harry. Type the number into Google and it immediately pops up - on a very pink website selling homemade slime. Thick, gluey and intensely squishable, slime was the toy of 2017 (the same year the site was last updated). The shop sells slime for $5, shipping is the same again. It also, inexplicably, sells six cupcakes for $18. And there is an email address with a name Gabby. When I call the number, it doesn't go well. After my first question Gabby goes silent. Then she hangs up. Jessica Simmons, a mother of two adopted children, both of whom she found on Facebook, knows the name Gabby, and that telephone number, all too well. In August 2016, a young woman contacted her on Facebook, saying she was pregnant. She began to fill in forms with Jessica's adoption agency, giving her name and address: a small town outside Atlanta. Her age: 23. "After about a month of talking to her every day, I reached out to one of her family members by private message," says Jessica. The family member told her this was not the first time Gabby had pretended to be pregnant, and not to trust her. There was "nothing anybody could do to stop her" Jessica was told.
Three years later, a pregnant 16-year-old from Georgia called a Google Voice number on a Minnesotan couple's adoption page. As they talked with her for hours, they inadvertently recorded part of a conversation. Listening back to the recording, the young woman's nasal voice still gets to the wife, making her anxious. "She spoke very low and quiet," she remembers. "She was very needy and demanding and it made me very uncomfortable."
As well as the fake Instagram accounts, Gabby also has a personal one. Photos of a curly-haired girl with glasses sit alongside slime-making videos, in which her voice can be heard - it's the same as in the recording, and it's the one I heard on the telephone. Nothing has been posted on this Instagram account since June 2018. There is no mention of babies, adoption or pregnancy. The list of people she is following is revealing, however. It includes Ashley King. By the time I speak to Ashley a second time, she herself has come to suspect Gabby may be the woman impersonating her, after stumbling across a bizarre series of messages from her on Facebook, most of which she doesn't remember having received. The first message congratulates Ashley on the birth of her daughter. Then they keep coming, asking for baby pictures and updates on the child's health, month after month. At one point Gabby says: "Can you send me a video of yourself saying, 'Hey'? Then I'll leave you alone. Or 'Hey I'm Ashley.'"
Although that request goes unanswered, Ashley does occasionally send short, polite replies. And once or twice she even responds to Gabby's strange demands for example by sending a photo of her post-baby stomach. A photo which, of course, ends up on Instagram. At the time, Ashley points out, she had a newly born premature baby and passed much of her time in a sleep-deprived haze. It was only later that she realised just how many messages she'd received from this random Facebook friend, whom her husband had known vaguely when they were younger. "When I was going through them, I was like, 'Oh my goodness, I should've seen this a long time ago, when it first started happening,'" says Ashley. "I was very angry with myself. How I could not have caught it before?"
Juli Wisotsky can't quite believe it when she ends up on the phone with Gabby again on 31 July, four months after their first conversation. From her law office, she takes a call from a 15-year-old named Mackenzie on behalf of a couple in New York, with a story she feels like she's heard before. After one minute of 20 seconds the girl hangs up and blocks her number. This call comes more than two weeks after I started messaging Gabby and asking questions about her conversations with couples hoping to adopt. A number of fake accounts Gabby used were reported to Instagram by her victims, but they remained online for months until the BBC started asking Instagram why. Then they were deleted. An Instagram spokesman said: "Keeping people safe on Instagram is one of our biggest priorities. We're aware of this issue and will disable any further accounts in violation of our policies. We encourage anyone to report content they think is against our guidelines using our in-app tools."
"It is breaking people's hearts," says Juli. "It's just wrong and it's evil. And that's a strong word to use. But I believe it is."
"The more I think about her and who she probably is she probably has a very sad existence," says Sam. "Part of me thinks that she might not even realize` what she's doing is wrong."
Sam just wishes she would stop. It is another rainy Sunday in Wixom, this time in May. An Instagram message from a private account comes through to Samantha Stewart's phone. "Here we go again," she thinks.
"I was super suspicious. But it was much different on the phone with her," remembers Sam. The woman "asked all the right questions. She wanted to know about me and my husband. About our house."
The next day, the sun comes out. Sam and Dave drive for three-quarters of an hour to meet the young woman with their adoption agency worker. Twelve days later the couple is at home with their new baby, Parker. "The instant he took his first breath everything was healed," Sam sobs.
"Every bit of heartache and worry, it all disappears. I wouldn't want this type of scam or anything like this to deter people. Because even though it's horrible, you won't regret it. It won't matter. You bring your baby home and none of it matters."
Sam changes their Instagram handle to @wefoundbabystewart.
Long before the arrival of the internet, women would call for "hour-long-talking-with-your-best-friend conversations", she says, and it was "never ever to do with money -never". "Then you realise that the due date is long gone, and you're still talking. There are so many lonely people out in this world today that just want some attention."
It's a scam that's hard to prosecute. Most states still don't have legal tools. Since September 2018 there have been laws in place in Georgia to stop financial adoption fraud, but not the emotional kind. "It's very frustrating," says Juli Wisotsky.
One option could be to raise a civil case for intentional infliction of emotional distress. "But, does somebody want to get involved in a lawsuit for that?" she asks. "Or do they just want to let it go and try to heal and grieve what is a loss to them? Even though there was no baby there, they thought there was a baby. It's grief."
Traumatised couples regularly report this scam to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Centre. In a statement, the FBI told the BBC that although they were aware of emotional adoption scams, these were still uncommon. None of the parents have received a follow-up call. But it's not only the potential parents who have been hurt, but there's also another person too. Because Ashley isn't just a fake Instagram profile, cobbled together from some images and an active imagination. Ashley is a real 22-year-old, who lives in Georgia. Her name is Ashley King and her identity has been stolen. Sam, playing detective, finds Ashley's profile easily - the pictures are all public. She messages her to warn her that her photographs are being used to trick people. And she points out that whoever runs the fake Instagram accounts knows intimate details about her life, her husband and her baby. Ashley's voice lowers as she describes the shock of seeing photos of her newborn child on another person's Instagram account. "The woman had loads of people thinking that they were going to adopt my daughter," she says. "It's a really scary thought. Why would someone do that?"
She immediately files a report with Gwinnett County Police. What the scammer says about Ashley's childhood is completely false, she explains, but when it comes to her daughter the impostor even knows what hospital she was born in. "King stated the only information that was incorrect on her daughter was that she was listed as being born prematurely at 2lb 8oz when in reality she was born at 2lb 12oz," reads the police report.
"All other information was correct."
Sam thinks it's likely that the fake Ashley knows the real one. "I don't live in a very big town but if you picked a random woman out of my town and expected me to know her life story, I wouldn't know it," she says. "You would only know those details if you actually knew someone."
But Ashley has no idea who it might be, and this makes her nervous. "Now I have to look over my shoulder making sure this woman isn't watching my kid because she knows about where I lived," she says. "It's really scary." (Ashley and her family have since moved house.)
Georgia has a law on identity theft, but it's debatable whether it is applicable in this case. A few states have already passed legislation to tackle online impersonation, but prosecutions may not succeed if no money has changed hands. Who can put a value on a broken heart?
Gwinnett County Police say they are not currently investigating. It must be hard for the scammer to remember exactly what she has said to different couples. When Sam is first contacted it's by someone pretending to be 16 years old. But a month later, Ashley says she will get her dad to call the adoption attorney "since I am only 15".
The scammer tells another couple that her middle name is Lorraine. Later, they suggest Olivia Lorraine as a potential name for the baby. She then replies, "Olivia is my middle name! Sounds perfect to us!"
But these are not her biggest mistakes. To call or text hopeful parents, the scammer uses non-fixed Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone numbers, the technical name for calls that go over the internet, created through companies such as Google or Skype. These numbers require very little information on sign-up, making them difficult to trace. But just occasionally she gets careless. One of the numbers used to contact Juli and Kristen isn't an internet number. It's a real mobile number, from Georgia, and registered to someone called Harry. Type the number into Google and it immediately pops up - on a very pink website selling homemade slime. Thick, gluey and intensely squishable, slime was the toy of 2017 (the same year the site was last updated). The shop sells slime for $5, shipping is the same again. It also, inexplicably, sells six cupcakes for $18. And there is an email address with a name Gabby. When I call the number, it doesn't go well. After my first question Gabby goes silent. Then she hangs up. Jessica Simmons, a mother of two adopted children, both of whom she found on Facebook, knows the name Gabby, and that telephone number, all too well. In August 2016, a young woman contacted her on Facebook, saying she was pregnant. She began to fill in forms with Jessica's adoption agency, giving her name and address: a small town outside Atlanta. Her age: 23. "After about a month of talking to her every day, I reached out to one of her family members by private message," says Jessica. The family member told her this was not the first time Gabby had pretended to be pregnant, and not to trust her. There was "nothing anybody could do to stop her" Jessica was told.
Three years later, a pregnant 16-year-old from Georgia called a Google Voice number on a Minnesotan couple's adoption page. As they talked with her for hours, they inadvertently recorded part of a conversation. Listening back to the recording, the young woman's nasal voice still gets to the wife, making her anxious. "She spoke very low and quiet," she remembers. "She was very needy and demanding and it made me very uncomfortable."
As well as the fake Instagram accounts, Gabby also has a personal one. Photos of a curly-haired girl with glasses sit alongside slime-making videos, in which her voice can be heard - it's the same as in the recording, and it's the one I heard on the telephone. Nothing has been posted on this Instagram account since June 2018. There is no mention of babies, adoption or pregnancy. The list of people she is following is revealing, however. It includes Ashley King. By the time I speak to Ashley a second time, she herself has come to suspect Gabby may be the woman impersonating her, after stumbling across a bizarre series of messages from her on Facebook, most of which she doesn't remember having received. The first message congratulates Ashley on the birth of her daughter. Then they keep coming, asking for baby pictures and updates on the child's health, month after month. At one point Gabby says: "Can you send me a video of yourself saying, 'Hey'? Then I'll leave you alone. Or 'Hey I'm Ashley.'"
Although that request goes unanswered, Ashley does occasionally send short, polite replies. And once or twice she even responds to Gabby's strange demands for example by sending a photo of her post-baby stomach. A photo which, of course, ends up on Instagram. At the time, Ashley points out, she had a newly born premature baby and passed much of her time in a sleep-deprived haze. It was only later that she realised just how many messages she'd received from this random Facebook friend, whom her husband had known vaguely when they were younger. "When I was going through them, I was like, 'Oh my goodness, I should've seen this a long time ago, when it first started happening,'" says Ashley. "I was very angry with myself. How I could not have caught it before?"
Juli Wisotsky can't quite believe it when she ends up on the phone with Gabby again on 31 July, four months after their first conversation. From her law office, she takes a call from a 15-year-old named Mackenzie on behalf of a couple in New York, with a story she feels like she's heard before. After one minute of 20 seconds the girl hangs up and blocks her number. This call comes more than two weeks after I started messaging Gabby and asking questions about her conversations with couples hoping to adopt. A number of fake accounts Gabby used were reported to Instagram by her victims, but they remained online for months until the BBC started asking Instagram why. Then they were deleted. An Instagram spokesman said: "Keeping people safe on Instagram is one of our biggest priorities. We're aware of this issue and will disable any further accounts in violation of our policies. We encourage anyone to report content they think is against our guidelines using our in-app tools."
"It is breaking people's hearts," says Juli. "It's just wrong and it's evil. And that's a strong word to use. But I believe it is."
"The more I think about her and who she probably is she probably has a very sad existence," says Sam. "Part of me thinks that she might not even realize` what she's doing is wrong."
Sam just wishes she would stop. It is another rainy Sunday in Wixom, this time in May. An Instagram message from a private account comes through to Samantha Stewart's phone. "Here we go again," she thinks.
"I was super suspicious. But it was much different on the phone with her," remembers Sam. The woman "asked all the right questions. She wanted to know about me and my husband. About our house."
The next day, the sun comes out. Sam and Dave drive for three-quarters of an hour to meet the young woman with their adoption agency worker. Twelve days later the couple is at home with their new baby, Parker. "The instant he took his first breath everything was healed," Sam sobs.
"Every bit of heartache and worry, it all disappears. I wouldn't want this type of scam or anything like this to deter people. Because even though it's horrible, you won't regret it. It won't matter. You bring your baby home and none of it matters."
Sam changes their Instagram handle to @wefoundbabystewart.