https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-49425794The fake baby Instagram adoption scam
By Naomi Pallas BBC Stories
23 August 2019
When US couples want to adopt a baby they often post ads online and search social media for women pregnant with a child they aren't planning to keep. Sometimes it works but there are dangers. One young scammer has tricked countless couples, just for fun, by stealing the identity of a pregnant woman. It's early February 2019, halfway through one of the coldest Michigan winters in recent history. The grey sky threatens snow. Thirty-three-year-old Samantha Stewart is in her pyjamas at home in Wixom, just outside Detroit, doing Sunday morning chores. There's a full washing basket, a house to be cleaned and dogs to walk. It's just after 11:00 when she receives a direct message request on Instagram from @ashleymamabear2019. It's not anyone she knows but she accepts the message and starts reading. "Are you looking to adopt still?" are the opening words.
It's six years since Sam had a hysterectomy. Throughout her 20s she underwent a series of operations in an attempt to control her endometriosis, a condition that causes the womb lining to grow in other parts of the body and can lead to crippling pain. They didn't work. By the time she was 27, it had become clear she would have to lose her womb and the chance of carrying a child. It took time for Sam to recover from the stress and the heartache. Though she longed for a family, it was only at the end of last year that she and her husband, Dave, felt ready to contact an adoption agency and begin the laborious process of adopting a child. They passed their home study, an assessment of their suitability to be parents, and underwent training. Then they set up an Instagram account, @findingbabystewart, posting requests for birth parents to contact them, illustrated by an empty cot in a freshly painted nursery. Sam examines @ashleymamabear2019's Instagram feed. Ashley is 16, from a small town outside Atlanta, Georgia. She posts mirror photos, love notes to her boyfriend Chris, and selfies with Snapchat filters. Her hair is straight and honey-blonde and a backward cap usually covers his. But there is one thing that sets them apart from thousands of other American teen couples the occasional shots of Ashley's figure, her face beaming as Chris places his hand against her swollen, round belly. This is the baby Ashley is offering to Sam and Dave. The women begin messaging, but not before Sam has excitedly called Dave, her parents and Dave's parents. She doesn't spend much time wondering why they look so happy about the pregnancy, bearing in mind that it is unwanted. They're young, she thinks. "Are you guys talking to any other adoptive families?" ventures, Sam. "I'm just scared of being hurt. I want to be a mom so badly."
"Nope," comes the reply.
Minutes later, Sam shoots back: "I'm crying."
Ashley's life had been harrowing. Her parents were abusive, her mother killed herself. She was raped by her brother at the age of 14, resulting in a premature baby, a little girl who was placed for adoption. The adoptive parents shut Ashley out, preventing her from seeing her child. It would be hard to write a bleaker story. The contact is constant. Sometimes Chris takes over texting because Ashley is feeling sick. When they talk on the phone, Sam finds Ashley's conversation immature, makes her excuses and hangs up after half an hour. The text about adoption plans late into the evening. The temperature has now dropped to -5C, and light snow is falling. Sam is exhausted from messaging. She explains that she's heading out for dinner, and so won't be on her phone for a few hours. She passes on her adoption agency's details. But then, suddenly, Ashley becomes abusive. She tells Sam she would be a bad parent. Shocked and hurt, Sam stops replying. The adrenaline that has kept her going all day suddenly drains away, and she crashes on to the sofa. "It's just, it's devastating. There's no other way to describe it," she says later, remembering this moment.
Sam assumes she will never hear from Ashley again. She and Dave consider deleting their Instagram posts appealing for pregnant women to contact them. Sam begins to feel that adopting a baby will take a long, long time. Then, exactly a month later, as icy patches of ground are beginning to thaw, a message arrives. Ashley tells Sam the baby has been born early, at 31 weeks. Exasperated, Sam tells Ashley to contact her adoption agency, or leave her family alone: "Have a nice life and don't contact me."
It only takes 14 messages, though, for Ashley to persuade Sam that there really is a premature baby waiting for adoption. She names the medical centre where she gave birth and Sam and Dave get ready to fly there. Ashley sends a photograph of her cuddling a premature baby, wrapped in a white towel, wires trailing from the small body. It's captioned, "She's yours."
"Omg, I'm literally losing it. I can't wait to meet her," Sam replies. "I can't wait to spoil that pretty little baby!"
There are three days of non-stop talking. Then Ashley blocks Sam on Instagram. When Sam calls, Ashley doesn't pick up. There is no explanation, just silence. Distressed, frantic, but already sensing that Ashley has been getting a thrill out of tormenting her, Sam posts a drawing of a broken heart on Instagram. "They don't ask for money, they don't ask for material things like a lot of scams do. They want your time, emotional investment and quite frankly someone to talk to while promising you what you are desperate to find: your future child," she writes in the caption.
"We need to talk about this."
The comments start coming in. Sam is not the only one whom Ashley has tricked. In many countries, social media would be the last place anyone would look for a baby to adopt. In the US, though, most states allow something called private adoption, where couples hoping to adopt and birth mothers find each other independently. The arrangement is then formalised by an attorney or an adoption agency. When Sam and Dave first signed up at their adoption agency, they were number 21 on the list of prospective adoptive parents. The agency warned them to expect a long wait and said they might get quicker results advertising themselves on the internet. Pregnant women who don't intend to keep their children have the same choice to approach adoption agencies or search for adoptive parents online. Apparently, many feel that by making contact with parents directly they have more control. At the time of writing, #hopingtoadopt is hashtagged 44,892 times on Instagram; #waitingtoadopt is mentioned 18,844 times and #hopefuladoptiveparents 10,758. Images of letter boards jostle for the attention of birth mothers: No Bump, Still Pumped, We're Adopting; Share This Photo and Help Our Family Grow; We are Officially a Waiting Family. There aren't enough babies to go round, though, so many of these thousands of hopeful parents will be disappointed. The problem has got worse since countries that once provided large numbers of babies for adoption, such as Russia, China, and Guatemala clamped down. "Most countries have ceased to allow the adoption of their children internationally, so the raw numbers have plummeted over the last 10 to 15 years by huge margins," says Adam Pertman, president of the National Centre on Adoption and Permanency.
Unplanned pregnancies have also become less common in the US and the reduced stigma around single parenthood means that, when they do occur, the mothers are more likely to keep the child. The National Council for Adoption's last survey estimates that less than 0.5% of babies are placed for adoption. Couples hoping to adopt may already have spent years trying to conceive, and even if they haven't, the long wait for a baby to become available for adoption can be frustrating and lead to impatience. "Urgency creates desperation, and desperation creates sometimes decisions not being made with enough thought," says adoption specialist Dawn Smith Pleiner.
"Even though in the back of your head you know that it's probably not real, there's that glimmer, that feeling that there's a 1% chance it could be," says Sam. "And you go with it anyway."
The comments stack up under Sam's broken-heart Instagram post. In Utah, Kristen and Michael Johnson have also been contacted by Ashley and Chris, though this time the teenagers from Georgia have used a different account. In Kentucky, Ashley Middleton and her husband Brian have received messages from this second account. Another woman says she has been contacted by both Instagram accounts. (It is most often women who are approached - two couples say that Ashley refused to speak to their male partner.) The photos all feature the same pregnant blonde-haired young woman from Georgia, offering up her child. Kristen starts getting messages from Ashley on 14 March, the day after unbeknown to her Ashley has ghosted Sam. Over rambling, intense phone-calls, Ashley urges Kristen to visit her 31-week-old prematurely born baby. "One time, I talked to her for four hours. It's a long time. I don't even talk to my own mother for that long, ever," says Kristen.
Ashley hits the Johnsons at a particularly vulnerable moment. They've been waiting two-and-a-half years to adopt one more child. "We were so tired and sick of trying to adopt, and wanting it to be done," Kristen says. "We got highly emotional about it instead of thinking more rationally."
Kristen book flights to Atlanta for $500. In the frantic scrum to find a babysitter, she realises that Ashley hasn't sent any documents from the hospital. She rings to double-check. It's a brief phone call: the charge nurse tells her there is no 15-year-old called Ashley, no father called Chris and no baby. "My stomach just dropped and I was literally sick. We cried a lot. My husband cried," she says.
"We couldn't believe, after everything we had been through, that we still fell for it."
There was a Facebook group where couples shared stories like this the internet has made it easier to carry out a scam, but also harder to sustain one. The names used by many scammers all over the country are shared and circulated quickly. Ashley, it turns out, uses a number of names and accounts: Alyssa and Josh, Ciara and Daniel, Mackenzie and Matt. Each couple's story has familiar elements, either the same abusive parents, the mum lost to suicide or the connection to Georgia. Usually, it's all three. Messages are incessant, phone calls come at strange times, and conversations drag out over hours. Sometimes the ruse lasts for a day, sometimes a few. It typically ends in tears. Sam thinks the scammer's real name is Melissa because a couple of the fake Instagram accounts have tagged someone with this name. Melissa has square-framed glasses, tangled red hair, and looks as though she's in her late 20s. Kristen isn't convinced. She has a hunch the scammer is a spiteful middle-aged woman. Both agree, though, that the perpetrator is probably based somewhere not far from Atlanta because she knows the area so well. Other victims have different theories. Some wonder if the scammer is, in fact, a group of people, because of the amount of time it must take to send so many messages perhaps a group of anti-adoption activists, whose aim is to keep hopeful parents busy, to demoralise them and to hinder their search for real birth mothers. Juli Wisotsky, an adoption attorney based in Athens, Georgia, says she too has had her time wasted. In March, an adoption agency from another state asked her to talk to a pregnant girl who had matched with one of their couples. Although Juli was about to go on a platinum wedding anniversary trip with her husband, she delayed it to talk. She and the 15-year-old exchanged messages through the night, as the girl claimed she was being admitted to hospital. Despite her 23 years' experience in the job, it took Juli nearly 24 hours to realise she was being conned. The final giveaway was an ultrasound image, stripped of all identifying details. "It's partly my fault as I'm a very nurturing person. So I'm trying to nurture her and help her," Juli says.
