Ron Reigns:
Welcome, and thank you for joining us on Birth Mother Matters in Adoption, with Kelly Rourke-Scarry, and me, Ron Reigns, where we delve into the issues of adoption from every angle of the adoption triad.
Speaker 2:
Do what’s best for your kid, and for yourself, because if you can’t take care of yourself, you’re definitely not going to be able to take care of that kid, and that’s not fair.
Speaker 3:
And I know that my daughter would be well taken care of with them.
Speaker 4:
Don’t have an abortion, give this child a chance.
Speaker 5:
All I could think about was needing to save my son.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
My name is Kelly Rourke-Scarry, I’m the Executive Director, President and Co-Founder of Building Arizona Families Adoption Agency, the Donna K. Evans Foundation, and creator of the You Before Me Campaign. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Family Studies and Human Development, and a Master’s Degree in Education, with an emphasis in School Counseling. I was adopted at the age of three days, born to a teen birth mother, raised in a closed adoption, and reunited with my birth mother in 2007. I have worked in the adoption field for over 15 years.
Ron Reigns:
And I’m Ron Reigns. I’ve worked in radio since 1999, I was the co-host of two successful morning shows in Prescott, Arizona. Now I work for my wife, who’s an adoption attorney, and I’m able to combine these two great passions and share them on this podcast.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Okay, so today, we’re going to begin our two part series on adoption, and fraudulent activity, and scams, that are an unfortunate part of the adoption world. Adoption fraud refers to any form of intentional misrepresentation, or an illegal act, in the area of adoption. Prospective birth parents, adopting parents, and adoption professionals, are all capable of adoption fraud. Today we’re going to focus on part one, which is birth mothers, and how they can scam an agency, an adoption attorney, or an adoption entity. So, Ron, have you watched the news in the last, let’s say 15 years, and seen these stories posted about these families that have just had this incredible heartache, and what they’ve gone through when they have been a victim of an adoption scam?
Ron Reigns:
I have not seen it so much on the news. I mean, we see it from time to time with the firm, and also through Building Arizona Families, but I haven’t seen it on the news, no.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Right, and when you say that, I want to let people know that adoption scams are everywhere. Do agencies get scammed? Yes. Do attorneys get scammed? Yes. Do adoption professionals get scammed? Yes. There are very good scammers out there, and so what we’re going to do today is talk about the scams that we see, what we as an agency and what other attorneys and professionals can do to minimize the risk of being scammed, and being open to fraud. And we can also let the adoptive families know what recourse they can take, and what they can do to be preventative, and what they can also do on the reactive side, if does happen to them.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And going into this, I want everybody to know that because an agency gets scammed, or because an attorney is being scammed, or an adoption professional, that doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with that entity. It means that there is a good scammer out there, and what you want to do is you want to minimize the possibilities of being scammed, and so there are precautions that we take.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So let’s first go into just the types of adoption scams. So, with a birth mother, or an expectant mother, the most common type is when a birth mother is looking for financial resources, and she may or may not be pregnant, but she’s looking to receive those resources without the intent of placing a baby for adoption. That is what we see when we’re talking about birth mothers. So digging deeper, we want to look at why birth mothers scam, what type of scams that we have seen, witnessed, heard about, what we do as an agency to protect our agency and our adoptive families from being scammed. And then, like I said before, what adoptive families can do on a proactive approach, and a reactive approach.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Scamming is a real part of the adoption world, and it is scary for adoption agencies as well. What some adoptive families don’t realize is that whether it is an adoption attorney, or an adoption agency, when we are scammed, we lose financially right along with the adoptive family, just like an attorney or another adoption professional would as well. The heartache is very different for a family than it would be for a professional. However, case workers are very vested in what they’re doing. In the adoption world, your work becomes your mission, it becomes your life and your focus. And so when you’re scammed, we get hurt too, but that’s not to take away or diminish those feelings that the adoptive family has.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Some birth mothers may be scamming because they are living on the streets and they’re desperate for financial assistance. They may have had a friend that went through an agency and they saw all the resources that they received, and the financial help that they got, and they want to receive those same benefits. Maybe they’ve done an adoption in the past, and they know what benefits that they can receive, and what financial assistance they can receive, and so by putting themselves in that position to receive those benefits again, they feel like they’re putting themselves in a better place. And maybe they have a drug habit, and they’re just trying to fund their drug habit. So again, the majority of what we see as an agency, now this could be very different from somebody who’s doing a private adoption by themselves, and they are working with their own birth mother. This, again, we’re talking about working with an entity rather than a family working solely with a birth mom, because that’s a whole different can of worms.
Ron Reigns:
When you talk about somebody seeing a friend who’s gone through the adoption, do you see the scamming come in waves?
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I do.
Ron Reigns:
For instance, one friend realizes, “Hey, I can get this money without having any intention whatsoever,” and then she tells two friends, and then she tells two friends, kind of thing?
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So, it is very common for us to receive referrals from friends of our clients. And I have to say, let’s say we have birth mother A come into the program, and she’s in the program, and birth mother B comes into the program and says, “Oh, I learned about you guys from birth mother A, and she told me how amazing you are, and I want to be in the program too.” And then time goes on, and birth mother A does not place, and it looks like she scammed, we start to really worry about birth mother B, because then you begin to wonder, “Okay, is she going to follow suit?” So do see it in groups? Yes.
Ron Reigns:
Okay.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And we definitely, in reaching out with the other agencies and talking with attorneys, they see the same thing. They do come in clusters. That’s what I call them, just clusters of scammers, and we’ll go months and months and months and not see anything that is really something that you can say, “Okay, that’s definitely fraudulent.” I mean, sometimes you wonder, birth mothers do change their minds. And again, if they choose to parent, we can celebrate that, if they’re able to, but when you have every indicator, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit of what those indicators are, when you have those, that’s when you think that it’s more fraudulent rather than her just changing her mind.
Ron Reigns:
According to the Arizona State Statute, the court may approve any monies paid to a parent of a child placed for adoption, or another person, for the benefit of the parent or the adopted child for reasonable and necessary expenses incurred in connection with the adoption. These expenses may include cost for medical and hospital care, and examinations for the mother and the child, counseling fees, legal fees, agency fees, living expenses, and any other costs the court finds reasonable and necessary. Under Statute 8-28, the Violation Classification, a person who knowingly violates any provision of this article is guilty of a Class VI felony.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Okay, so understanding the Arizona State Statutes, and what you just read, Ron, is basically the groundwork for what agencies and attorneys and adoption professionals have to work off of in the State of Arizona. Again, these are Arizona State Statutes. So, we have to make sure that we are adhering to these, these are also the basis or the groundwork of what a family can use, ultimately, if they are scammed. Because in order to go after somebody else, or press charges, you have to be able to cite a law that has been broken. That is one.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
We will often get the question asked, “What kind of scams have you seen or witnessed?” What the most common ones are, we’ll have a woman come into the office, and we have them take a pregnancy test when she comes in. And she’ll say, “I can’t pee right now, so let’s go ahead and get started.” And for all of the listeners that have been pregnant, most pregnant women can pee any time, I mean-
Ron Reigns:
Just kind of on demand, they’re ready to go.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah.
Ron Reigns:
Okay.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
We’re good.
Ron Reigns:
They got a lot of pressure going on down there, okay.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So we’ll often give them some water, and give them some time, but they try to avoid taking that pregnancy test. We had one woman that took a straw wrapper and tried to make, she took the window out of the little test screen, and it was a McDonald’s wrapper that had the blue line down it, and she tried to fit it in so it made the negative into a positive. Graphic design probably wasn’t in her future.
Ron Reigns:
Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So it-
Ron Reigns:
But she definitely was creative. I give her points for that.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Oh, some of the scams are very creative. So that was another one. Bringing in an altered ultrasound, say that five times real fast.
Ron Reigns:
Altered ultrasound, that is tough.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You, unfortunately, can purchase these, and with Photoshop, again, I don’t want to give out too much information because I don’t want people to then learn how to do this.
Ron Reigns:
Not trying to give out ideas, right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Right. So altered ultrasounds is one that we’ve seen. Altered medical records. We had one girl take a pregnancy test out of the bathroom trash can that had been positive.
Ron Reigns:
From a previous mother.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Right, and say that that was hers. So now, we obviously have all of them disposed in a trash can up at the front area so that we can monitor those.
Ron Reigns:
Right. Live and learn. That’s a good point there. Okay.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
We’ve had women who have an unfortunate miscarriage, or they choose to have an abortion, and they continue to receive the funding as if they’re still pregnant. They pretend to be vested in their adoption plan when their plan is either to parent or to work with child protective services. We’ve had women who have actually had the baby, and will put a pillow underneath their shirt and pretend like they’re still pregnant. And so, as we encounter these, we learn from them.
Ron Reigns:
Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And we have taken lots of precautions so that, what is the saying? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Ron Reigns:
Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So, these happen once, and then we learn from them, and we like to share that knowledge. But again, there’s only so much I can say in this podcast because I don’t want to give away some of the procedures and strategies that we use to protect our adoptive families in the agency.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So, because the motivation is usually for money, birth mothers are not as focused on following the protocols of the adoption plan and the guidelines of the program. So, we start to get concerned when she starts avoiding appointment, after appointment, after appointment. And then maybe she has signed a medical release at the intake, but then has retracted it.
Ron Reigns:
Okay.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
During her pregnancy, so that we can’t receive her medical records. She says that she’ll do a phone call or a meeting with the adoptive family, and then avoids it. That’s another one. She may change her story about the pregnancy and about her situation. She may say, “Oh yes, I have no idea who the birth father is.” Or here’s another one that we’ve had, where she says, “Yes, the birth father, his name is John and I don’t know his last name. Yes, I’ve been living with him for five years and I have three other children by him, but I don’t know his last name.”
Ron Reigns:
You don’t know his last name, right. “We don’t like to get too personal.”
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So she may be working with more than one agency or adoption entity. Unfortunately, there is not a registry, per se, that when an agency is working with a birth mother, that you can go and register that this birth mother is working with this agency. That’s not allowed in the State of Arizona. So there’s not a central registry to do a database or fact check, like an attorney does when they get a client, they can make sure that they haven’t worked with them or somebody related to them in the past. We can’t do that.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
The birth mother does not want to deal with the attorney or the agency, and she tries to sidebar and work directly with the adoptive family, telling the adoptive family that the agency, she’s not happy with them, or the attorney’s not following through, and she just wants to work privately with them. So these are all concerns. I’m not going to say that these are red flags that lead us to be concerned about being scammed, or fraudulent activity going on, that doesn’t mean that they are. A birth mother not going to a doctor’s appointment is not a sole indicator of fraud, that happens all the time. But if, in conjunction with that, you’re starting to see some of these other patterns, that’s where you really have concern.
Ron Reigns:
Right. When they start piling up. One or two, you’re like, okay, it’s just kind raising the red flag-
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
When you look further, but when you start getting more and more, that’s where you get concerned. So, as an agency, what we do, and again, I’m solely speaking for Building Arizona Families, is we have a series of our case workers and people within our agency that meet with a birth mother, as well as an independent adoption counselor. I also, as a director, meet with every birth mother during the course of her pregnancy, usually when she comes into the program, during each trimester, and then before she delivers, is the goal. Now with COVID, that’s changed a little bit because of, obviously, social distancing and so forth, but that’s the normal protocol. And in doing that, I have probably met and worked with over a thousand birth mothers. So, I have some experience, I’m speaking tongue in cheek, in working with them and kind of dissecting where they’re going with their plan.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Additionally, our Director of Operations had me trained by somebody who specializes in working with people to detect their ability to lie, and if they’re lying to you. And so I underwent this training where, at the end of it, he would put up a video, and I would have to point to him all of the signs of the person lying in that video, like what they were doing. Because again, you want to make sure that their behavior is matching what they’re saying, is matching their story previously. So there’s a whole bunch of things that I underwent just as an additional safety net to screen the moms as they’re coming in.
Ron Reigns:
Right. And again, now, would this be something, it would just be another thing to raise a red flag, is that correct? It wouldn’t be like-
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Well, it depends.
Ron Reigns:
Okay, this gal is lying to me. I can tell.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah, if there was an issue that we were worried about. She’s brought in, and I’m sitting down and I’m talking with her. I have exited moms from our program because I felt that their desire was really not to do adoption, and their plan was not solid, and they would not be a good match for an adoptive family, it was too high of a risk. And there have been some periods where quite a few have been exited after I’ve talked with them, because I didn’t feel like it was a good risk for an adoptive family. And so it’s not solely because I took a course in trying to pick up if somebody is being deceitful or not, but it’s because, again, we want to make sure that to the best of their ability, at this moment, they have an adoption plan, this is truly what they want to do, and is in their best interest.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So every birth mother who comes into our office for an adoption intake has to take a pregnancy test. But before we will match her with a family, we actually have her get a medical ultrasound with an estimated due date, because we want to make sure that there is a viable pregnancy, that she really is pregnant, that there is a baby in there. And that way, if for some reason, she was able to pass a test, whether she had pregnancy urine from somebody else that wasn’t visible to us, that she took, we’re able to catch her that way before a family gets involved.
Ron Reigns:
Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So we sure that that precaution is taken. And unfortunately, we’ve caught some that way. Yeah.
Ron Reigns:
Wow.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So that is really-
Ron Reigns:
When it comes to that, it makes me, well, I guess you don’t want to give away too many of your industry secrets. Let’s go back to the one who had taken the test from the garbage can from a previous birth mother. How did you actually catch her?
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
What happened was, she had a really hard time peeing, and at that point, I think she was supposed to have been four months pregnant. And so she brought the test back, and she kept going back, and she couldn’t pee, and she couldn’t pee, and then she was miraculously able to pee at that time, and brought the test up. And then they showed us the test, and she left afterwards, because she was already in the program. But because she hadn’t seen a doctor in the last six weeks, we had her do another test, and the case worker that was there with me had said, “Hang on a second. I just had a thought.” And I guess it was gut instinct, women’s intuition, and she went with gloves on, through the trash can, and she said, “Oh, that wasn’t her pregnancy test.”
Ron Reigns:
That was so and so’s, who was in 10 minutes before or whatever.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Correct.
Ron Reigns:
Okay.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And so at that point, we notified her that we needed her to go to the doctor to do an ultrasound, and she had to do it within the next 24 hours, because we weren’t going to continue to financially help support her, and give her the resources as she needed, if we didn’t have actual confirmation of her pregnancy. And she chose to not go to the doctor within that 24 hour period, and so she was let go from our program.
Ron Reigns:
Okay.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So there is ways to check some of this, but really, a pregnancy test is a good start, but really an ultrasound, seeing a baby with a heartbeat is really what we need to see. And we will either have a case worker there, we have a medical records clerk that will call the doctors and get confirmation and have it sent over to our office. So we’re gathering, this isn’t just, “Oh, I went to an ultrasound, and yeah, the baby looks great.” We have medical records, and confirmation as well.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
But I want to point out that birth mothers, it’s okay for them to explore adoption options without even starting an adoption. They’re allowed to talk to more than one agency or attorney. This is ethical and legal, and it’s something that I have no issue with whatsoever. They need to make sure they find the right fit. So, if they are going to different attorneys or adoption agencies and trying to gather information about that entity, I think that that’s absolutely fine, and that does not mean that somebody is scamming or being fraudulent.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
The other thing is-
Ron Reigns:
And it’s actually encouraged, because you want the best thing for everybody.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Right.
Ron Reigns:
Okay.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
The other thing is that a birth mother has a right to change her mind. That doesn’t mean that she’s scamming.
Ron Reigns:
Right.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Sometimes a birth mother will have every intent to place her baby for adoption, and when she sees her baby, and there’s that connection, she’s not able to go through with it. And that happens, and that’s the really hard part about adoption. But again, that doesn’t mean that it’s fraudulent, or that she’s scamming, that just means that she changed her mind. This is an emotional, heart wrenching decision. And as much as we want to prepare a birth mother for this moment of placing her child for adoption, there’s still those moms that cannot make that final, yes. They can’t say that final yes.
Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
If a family is scammed, and they speak with their agency, and they decide, “Yes, I am the victim of fraudulent adoption activity and I do want to do something about it,” they can absolutely decide to file a police report, call the Attorney General’s office on the birth mother. I know that as an agency, if an adoptive family wants to press charges against a birth mother, and we agree that there’s some concern and possible fraudulent activity, we absolutely assist the family in providing whatever documentation their attorney decides that is needed, and we will cooperate a hundred percent with law enforcement and so forth, to prosecute somebody that has knowingly, willingly, deceived a family in our agency. But again, there’s that decision, as an agency, and as a family, was this her changing her mind? Or was this her intent the whole time? And that’s what’s really hard sometimes to determine.
Ron Reigns:
Thank you for joining us on Birth Mother Matters in Adoption. If you’re listening and you’re dealing with an unplanned pregnancy and want more information about adoption, Building Arizona Families is a local Arizona adoption agency and available 24/7 by phone or text at (623) 695-4112, that’s (623) 695-4112. We can make an immediate appointment with you to get started on creating an Arizona adoption plan, or just get you more information. You can also find out more information about Building Arizona Families on their website at azpregnancyhelp.com. Thanks also go out to Grapes for allowing us to use their song, I Don’t Know, as our theme song. Birth Mother Matters in Adoption was written and produced by Kelly Rourke-Scarry, edited by me. Please rate and review this podcast wherever you’re listening to us. We’d really appreciate it. We also now have a website at birthmothermatterspodcast.com. Tune in next time on Birth Mother Matters in Adoption, for Kelly Rourke-Scarry, I’m Ron Reigns.