Episode 8 Podcast > Full Transcript
Nicole Witt, Greeting:
Hi, listeners, welcome back to Adopting! The Podcast. As always, I'm so excited to be your host for this journey. I'm Nicole Witt, Executive Director of The Adoption Consultancy where we guide pre-adoptive parents, step by step, through their adoption journey.
In Adopting! The Podcast, we focus on the issues, questions and concerns you have as you get started in your adoption journey. This is for people just considering, brand new to, or early in the process, who are trying to get their questions answered and figure out their best path forward. Also, to learn about what to expect and how the process works.
Nicole Witt, Intro:
So, I talked to lots and lots of people who are considering adoption, and one of the greatest fears I hear is that they will get scammed. Of course, that's a totally understandable fear, even though it happens far less often than people think. But it's just natural for it to be a concern since adoptive parents do obviously have a lot to lose if a placement doesn't go through. It costs them time, there is an emotional toll, and of course, there's a financial risk as well. So, not to downplay the first two, but it's the financial risk that seems to cause the most concern because that's the one that could really keep people from being able to move forward with another match.
Regardless, I find that most pre-adoptive parents are totally understanding that an expectant mom who is considering placing her child for adoption may have a change of heart and choose to parent. Although that's not the outcome that the adoptive parents are hoping for, they generally understand and support the birth mom in making that choice.
On the other hand, the area that tends to cause a lot more angst is the idea of getting scammed by someone who never intends to place their baby in the first place. Maybe there isn't even a baby, because she's not even pregnant, or maybe she is a he hiding behind a computer and wreaking havoc on vulnerable families. So, this is the scenario that I receive tons of questions about.
As I've alluded to, I think it's important to preface the following conversation with the fact that this doesn't happen nearly as often as people fear that it does. The vast majority of matches proceed to placement.
And another piece of good news, relatively speaking, is that a true scammer is pretty easy for your adoption professionals to spot. Normally, those situations get weeded out even prior to a match, and pre-adoptive parents would never even hear about them. In those instances, when they do get as far as a match, the scam is usually recognized well prior to the birth of the baby.
But today, we're going to talk about an important distinction between the different types of scammers, some red flags to look out for, and the best way you can protect yourself from getting duped.
Nicole Witt:
To help me do this, I would like to welcome Brian Esser, Esq. of the Law Office of Brian Esser. Brian is a solo practitioner whose practice focuses on building families through adoption, surrogacy and assisted reproductive technology.
He's a former member of the board of directors of the National LGBT Bar Foundation, where he served two terms as the board's president. A fellow of the Academy of Adoption and A.R.T. Attorneys, and a member of the ABA's Family Law Section Committees on Adoption and Assisted Reproductive Technology. Thank you so much for being here, Brian.
Brian Esser:
Thank you so much, Nicole. It's great to be here and get a chance to talk to your listeners.
Nicole:
Thank you. Let's just dive right in by starting with the two different types of scammers, which I think are more commonly known in adoption circles as the Financial Scammer and the Emotional Scammer.
So, a lot of people, their initial thinking, when they think of scams, is just to think of a financial scammer. And if somebody isn't asking for money, they think, “Oh, this can't be a scam”, right?
Brian:
Right.
Nicole:
Do you see a lot of both of those scenarios?
Brian:
I do. I mean, to be perfectly honest, I think the emotional scammers almost exceed – in either number or frankly, tenacity – the financial scammers. The financial scammers, like you said at the top, often those are really easy to weed out. Some of the better ones, it can be a little bit harder and it takes more time.
But the emotional scammers can be so difficult, and frankly, can be so draining. They're the types of strange individuals – And I'm not a student of abnormal psychology, so I couldn't really explain their motivations.
But they’re folks who get on the phone with my clients and will talk to them for an hour or more, and they'll talk about their vision for what post-placement looks like. They'll talk about their life circumstances and they'll just get my clients all kind of revved up and feeling like, “Oh, this is a great match. We really feel like we have a connection with this young woman. We really feel like something's happening here.” And they're so excited. They're talking about names of the baby; all this kind of stuff. I mean, like real tugging-at-the-heartstrings kind of things.
Nicole:
Right.
Brian:
But then they just never take it to the next level in terms of the process, in terms of returning required requests for information; like a social and medical history or a release that we could get access to pregnancy records.
And the other thing, I think, that sort of hooks folks in is these emotional scammers don't ask for money.
Nicole:
Right.
Brian:
And so, there is a sense that, “Well, she can't be scamming us because there's been no financial request.”
Nicole:
Exactly.
Brian:
And in some ways, that's it's actually kind of the opposite. I mean, because she's wasting their time, she's potentially wasting my time as an attorney. And I do bill by the hour.
So, it's not as if there's no financial repercussion for folks, but the object that they're trying to get is not money; it's trying to get attention.
Nicole:
Yeah. And like you said, I mean, we're not psychologists, but it is quite sad in a way. It seems like maybe they've just never been the center of attention. And I guess that's what they're getting out of this.
And usually, the cases I've heard about, they have a lot of drama going on in their life. And a lot of those conversations that you were referring to, the long conversations seem to need to take place in the middle of the night or at very inconvenient hours.
Brian:
Yeah.
Nicole:
So, those are some, some clues, I guess, for people where that's happening.
Have you seen an increase in the emotional scammers during the pandemic, when more and more aspects of the adoption process are happening virtually?
Brian:
I think there have been, yes, some uptick on that, in part because a lot of the things that people would do to kind of weed out some of these scams. Where if the expectant woman is within like an easy day trip, for adoptive parents to go to go meet with her, I'm finding that my clients aren't doing that. Or at least, they weren't during the height of the pandemic because of travel restrictions, because of their reasonable fears about Covid exposure and things like that. And certainly, pre-vaccination, people weren't doing that.
I think there was more of that, and I think there was also – you had those emotional scammer types, they were home by themselves and they had nothing better to do than to stir the pot and cause trouble for somebody else.
Nicole:
Yeah, yeah.
Jumping back over to the financial scammers. When you and I were communicating prior to this recording, you mentioned the two types of financial scammers or the two types, not necessarily of scammers. I guess a scammer could use both of them {indistinct 7:55} the financial scams. Do you want to elaborate on that a bit for us?
Brian:
I'm borrowing from a 30-Rock episode, actually, when I talk about the difference between sort of a short grift and a long con. There was an episode where they were talking about that.
I find that there's kind of two basic people. There's this sort of there's the short grift, where it's, “I saw your profile. You were exactly the family that I want to raise my child” – All those kind of lovey-dovey stuff – “but I don't have a place to sleep tonight, and I need you to send me $200” or like there's some other sort of like financial ask like that. It's not a large ask, but it's an immediate financial need. And they're not 100 percent leading with finances, but like the finance piece is there.
Nicole:
And sometimes it's a very emotional one, right? Like, “I'm hungry”, right?
Brian:
Sure.
Nicole:
Yeah.
Brian:
Yeah.
I feel like I hear a lot of, “I don't have a place to sleep tonight”, which like, you know, and like, “I'm nine months pregnant and it's a hundred degrees here in Arizona, and it's not safe for me to sleep outside.” That kind of thing.
But yeah, definitely like, “I'm hungry and like baby needs food” or “My doctors tell me I need this medicine.” Something like that. And we know absolutely nothing about this person, you know?
Nicole:
Right.
Brian:
We don't have a proof of pregnancy. We don't we have no information about them, but they want a few bucks right away.
And adoptive parents think like, “Okay. Well, I can send that two hundred bucks. It's not like a huge deal in my budget.” And maybe it's not; maybe you could afford to lose that two hundred dollars. But on some level, it's the principle of the thing.
And also, when you send that first $200, that doesn't solve the problem of their housing or, long term, solving the problem of food insecurity or something like that.
And so, you can expect it like, okay, if it was a hundred bucks today, it's going to be 200 bucks tomorrow and $500 next week. And suddenly you're short grift is going to turn into a long con.
So, the other folks that I feel like I see – and these are a lot more difficult to weed out – are the people who participate somewhat in the process that we set out. Where we say, like, “Okay, yeah, we're willing to talk to you about financial assistance, but we need you to return a social and medical history. We need a hipper release. And once that's done, we need you to talk to a lawyer or an agency or whatever it is in that state.”
And so, they’ll do some of these things and they'll kind of slow play it. And documents are in the mail. And, “Oh yeah, I mailed that”, even though we gave them a FedEx label with, you know?
Nicole:
Right.
Brian:
So that they get the email receipts. So, I know if it's been tendered to FedEx; stuff like that. Or we get confirmation that, yeah, they've received care at a certain medical facility, but then it takes like – they know it's going to be one that takes like six weeks to turn around records which, like some of the big universities, are like that.
Nicole:
Yes.
Brian:
And so, they're asking for help in that interim time, and then it's only when we get records back and we find out that the care that they received was for something totally not pregnancy related. And we've paid for hundreds of pages of medical records to be printed, only to find out that there's no pregnancy; there's no baby.
Nicole:
Right.
Brian:
It's interesting. Some of these folks have continued to ask for money and they've continued to be in contact with us right until the time that we get those records. So, we get sort of lack of confirmation of pregnancy. You know, I'm not suggesting that my clients have been scammed a lot, but that is not the case.
But they'll continue to work it, even though they're just like minutes away from being found out. It's similarly an interesting phenomenon of like the psychology
Nicole:
It is. It really is.
Now, as you've been alluding to, although the pre-adoptive parents should definitely rely heavily on their team of adoption professionals to keep them out of these high-risk situations.
Brian:
Yeah.
Nicole:
It's, of course, never a bad idea for everyone to know what some of the most common red flags are. One of the big ones is that the adoptive parents receive unsolicited contact from the supposedly expectant mom via social media. Do you find that most of the scam situations you see are initiated that way?
Nicole:
I'm in New York. And as a lawyer in New York, I'm not allowed to make matches. So, my clients have to be contacted directly by expectant parents in the first place. So, that's not necessarily a red flag for us in New York. That's actually kind of a typical way for folks to be contacted. But it does seem like there are some modes. I feel like Instagram is a little bit less reliable, in terms of the folks that are reaching out. And Facebook actually, interestingly, does seem to be a little bit more reliable in terms of a platform for making matches.
Nicole:
Okay, that's interesting. That's interesting.
What are some of the other red flags that you see; some of the details, maybe of their story, which sometimes can be completely valid, but maybe you're just worth kind of raising people's antenna for them to dig a little bit deeper?
Brian:
Yeah, I feel like one that I see a lot, that's always a sign that something else is going on is what I hear that the birth father passed away recently. During the height of the pandemic in the US, it was, “He just recently died of Covid.” More commonly, it had been car accident or motorcycle accident. I feel like those are scenarios that I've both seen and have read about with other people.
And then you don't get the death certificate. I mean, because if we were actually getting the death certificate, then I'd probably buy into it. But we're told, “I can get that from his family” and then it just never comes in.
I've had scenarios where there are twins involved, supposedly, and in the proposal is that we're going to break up the twins; that one twin would be placed for adoption and then the expectant parent wants to parent the other twin. And my clients have always found that – like even leaving aside whether that's kind of a scammy scenario – like nobody wants to get involved in potentially separating a set of twins. That just doesn't feel ethical and doesn't feel right. I'm trying to think of some other scenarios.
Nicole:
But I think it's just twins in general, even if they're talking about placing both of them. Again, I've certainly had lots of clients adopt twins and completely up and up situations, but it is something that should get people to dig a little deeper because the scammers know that a lot of adoptive parents love the idea of adopting twins. They're going through this whole process and they're thinking, “Well, we want two kids. Wouldn't it be great if we only had to go through this once?” And especially when they say it's a set of boy-girl twins, right?
Brian:
Oh, yeah.
Nicole:
They know that that's just going to draw people in, because they want that so badly to be true.
Brian:
Yeah.
Nicole:
So, that's definitely one that people should dig a little deeper for sure when they hear about the twin situations.
Brian:
Definitely. Definitely. Yeah, I mean, who wouldn't want to for the price of one, right?
Nicole:
Right.
Nicole:
You know, it sounds like it sounds like a great idea, but yeah. I mean, especially when you consider the naturally occurring twins are like – they're really quite rare, right?
Nicole:
Right.
Brian:
I mean, it's two percent of all pregnancies. So, if you were approached to adopt the set of twins, I mean, it's almost, you know, buy a lottery ticket, because your luck is high.
Nicole:
Right.
Also, there can be almost threat, sometimes thinly veiled, sometimes not so much, right?
Brian:
Yeah, definitely. That's a good one. Scenarios that I feel like I see are, “If you don't do X Y Z, I'm going to parent” and you think, “Okay. Well, on what level does that make sense?” I mean, if you did have the resources to parent, wouldn’t you just parent? And so, it does have to get your antenna up when you're starting to get that.
And similarly, like, “If you're not going to play by my rules, then I'm going to find a different family.” And sometimes, it's the right move to just call the bluff and say, like, “Okay, well, if it's got to be your way or the highway, then we'll just walk away.” I mean, because particularly when it comes to money, the sort of big picture, taking a lot of steps back is – the focus really should be on the child, in this entire process. The parents’ primary focus should be making a safe and secure and stable adoption and for the child.
Nicole:
Yeah.
Brian:
And if other things are getting in the way of that and if money is becoming the biggest thing that you're talking about, you're not dealing with somebody whose priority is the child. It's either themselves or it's finances or it's whatever it is, but it's not the child. And that's never going to work out. And even if she does make an adoption plan with you, it's going to be a really tumultuous relationship and you need to think about if that's something that you want to be involved in.
Nicole:
Yeah, I think that's a really important point, because when you were saying that, I was thinking there can be very valid cases where the expectant mom is saying, “I need X Y Z for this to make sense for me. And if you're not the family who's willing to provide that, then you're not the right family.” And then that's okay, if you're not the right family, right?
I know that people so desperately, of course, want to adopt and want to become parents, but it does have to be that that good match. Otherwise, like you said, it will be very tumultuous and it increases the chances of it not working out even if it's not a scam. So, it is important for people to have their boundaries and to stick to that regardless. And if that ends up weeding out a scam for them, then even better.
Brian:
That's right. That's right.
Nicole:
Yeah. You mentioned the, “And if you don't do this, I'm going to parent.” One of the things that I've heard, too – which again, if you really dig into it, it doesn't logically make sense, but it catches people's emotions – is that if you don't adopt this baby, if you're not the family, then I'm going to have an abortion. And that one is just – the logic doesn't hold. If she was comfortable with having an abortion, that may well be what she chose to do in the beginning. Why would it be this one family instead of another family?
Brian:
Right.
Nicole:
Most expectant moms are not actually making the choice between abortion and adoption; they're usually choosing between adoption and parenting, right?
Brian:
Yeah.
Nicole:
So, again, the logic doesn't really hold up. But when people are so caught up in the situation, obviously that's really going to pull at their heartstrings.
Brian:
Yeah, I think that's definitely right. And I mean, you also have to think about like where is she in the pregnancy? I mean, is this even a realistic option? Unless there's a medical issue, it's very difficult to terminate a pregnancy after 20 weeks. And so, in some ways, it's quite possibly a hollow threat.
And like you say, even if it is theoretically possible, how does that make sense? Does it make sense that she's going to carry the pregnancy to term if she really thinks that terminating the pregnancy is probably the better option for her.
Nicole:
Right. Right. Exactly. Okay.
So, let's move on to what people can do to protect themselves. Obviously one of the big things is having a team of reputable professionals to guide you through the process and to lean heavily on that team.
Brian:
Yes.
Nicole:
So, what are some of the things you recommend to your clients, for instance, if they are getting that short grift, like, “I need a place to sleep.” What should they do? How can they avoid being scammed?
Brian:
First thing that I always tell my clients is that don't have conversations about money with an expectant parent. If the subject of money comes up, that that question should be referred to me. I actually then take it a step further where I don't like to have conversations with expectant parents who don't already have either their own attorney, if it's not an agency state, or if we don't have an agency involved. Because I know New York law, but I'm not licensed to practice in all 50 states. And if the expectant parent is in a different state, I don't want us to run afoul of know of that other states law and then we jeopardize the entire placement.
So, first and foremost is we're dealing with these conversations, lawyer to lawyer or me to adoption agency, whatever. So, that's first step, so that we're taking the clients out of it and that brings down sort of the emotional tenor.
The other thing is, before we even get to the point of talking about providing help with living expenses, first of all, we need that social and medical history and then we need independent confirmation of pregnancy. It's way too easy these days for somebody who's a dedicated scammer to find an ultrasound or something like that on the internet. And with graphics editing technology, you can take out the original person's name and change the date. You can do all these types of things, and that's easy to do. So, an ultrasound is not sufficient to be proof of pregnancy. You really need records from the OBGYN.
I think it's the biggest thing that they can do is just be patient and not fall for the sort of the immediate emotional ask for financial assistance. Wait until you have a complete file and a complete picture, and then we can start looking at what expenses make sense. And then also work out a budget and then we're going to stick to the budget.
Nicole:
And just to reiterate that key point is not to fall for that in the beginning, not to send the money, not to give money directly without going through your agency or attorney.
And also, one point you made I want to circle back to in terms of her, the expectant mom having support, whether it's through an agency or an attorney. So, she may not have that at the beginning or may say she doesn't have that, and the hopeful adoptive parents can give her contact information. But it's very important that they ask her to reach out to that legal entity, right?
Brian:
Yes.
Nicole:
The legal entity cannot reach out to her because then that could be coercion, right?
Brian:
Okay.
Nicole:
And if she is serious about wanting to place the child, she will be happy to do that because then, like you've said, she can start getting legal support, emotional support, financial support. If she balks at that and says, “Well, let's save some money” and “Let's do it without an attorney involved” and “I don't want to make that call”, then that's when people should run in the other direction, right?
Brian:
For sure. And I mean, I get it. I mean, a lot of my clients, I'm the first lawyer that they've ever hired. Most of us go through our lives without needing to retain attorneys to do things for us. And depending on the background of the expectant parent, I mean, they might not have had good experiences with lawyers in the past. You know, if they've had family members who have had kids removed, put in foster care or contact with the criminal justice system, lawyers did not help their families. So, they don't view lawyers as like contact with lawyers or adoption agencies or anything like that as a positive support.
And so, I get that hesitation and that hesitation makes sense. But it's the process. And everybody needs to follow the process to make sure that everybody's rights are protected and that ultimately, that this adoption placement is going to go through.
Nicole:
Great advice. And I think before we kind of wrap up, just going back to reiterating the point that this does not happen as often as people fear. I mean, spending all this time talking about it, it does make it seem like it happens all the time, but it's not that frequent of an occurrence. So, people should take heart in that.
Before we wrap up, is there anything else about this topic that you want to add; anything you wish I had asked you that I haven't?
Brian:
I don't think so. This has been this has been a really great talk. I think we've covered a lot of ground. I hope this gives a lot people a lot of food for thought and does just help people understand that while there are some sketchy individuals out there looking to take advantage of folks, most of them are really easy to spot. And it's just not overly likely that folks are going to be caught up in a scam.
Nicole:
Great. Great. So, yeah, so on that note, let's wrap up. Let me thank you again, Brian and Brian Esser, Esq. with the Law Office of Brian Esser. And you can reach him at esser(That's E-S-S-E-R) esserlawoffice.com
And listeners, most of all, I'd like to thank you for tuning in. I hope you've learned something today that will allow you to move forward on your adoption journey with more peace of mind. Please be good to yourselves, take care and I'll catch you next time.