The Empty Crib

For six years, Kelly Kiser-Mostrom and her husband Ken Mostrom of Lincoln, Neb., had been relying on an established local agency to find a healthy baby to adopt. They had gone through the adoption gauntlet once before, with their first daughter, so they knew how long it could take. But they were getting impatient to "complete our family," as Kelly puts it. So they used their new computer to expand their search, browsing through online adoption sites. In April 1998, one of the sites referred them to Sonya Furlow and her Tender Hearts Adoption Facilitation Services, located in Philadelphia.

Furlow soon fired off an impressive stream of documents: page after page of progress notes and consent forms from the possible birth mothers she said she had found. "Andrea" was a high school cheerleader. "Vivian" had worked briefly for a Pennsylvania state senator but was now in a battered women's shelter in Harrisburg.

But the most promising match seemed to be with "Roxanne." Furlow, the adoption "facilitator," sent frequent e-mail updates on Roxanne and her boyfriend's soap-opera lives, and the Mostroms, in return, sent Furlow $4,500. Right after the baby was born, they bought plane tickets to Philadelphia, assured by Furlow that they could come pick up their baby. Kelly rushed out to tell her co-workers and buy an angel pin for Furlow.

But when the couple arrived, Furlow reported that Roxanne was having second thoughts--not uncommon in adoptions. For days, the Mostroms sat in a hotel room and waited. "Basically, I just sat in the room and cried the whole time," Kelly remembers. At one point, Furlow even appeared at the hotel--dressed in light-blue hospital scrubs. She'd just helped deliver another baby, she said, but had to rush off.

Only there was no baby, and there was no Roxanne. As the Mostroms would eventually learn, their story ran a predictable course. Over the past three years at least 43 other couples from as far away as California and Florida had signed Furlow up as their adoption facilitator--a sort of baby headhunter increasingly popular among adoptive parents because they work outside the constraints of traditional adoption lawyers or agencies. In almost every case, according to court documents, Furlow had fictionalized--in mesmerizing detail--all the characters in her act.

Adoption lawyers and advocates say Furlow's scam is unusual because of the number of victims and the degree of her deception. But they report hearing more and more fraud stories, partly because of the Internet's way of lending legitimacy to anyone who can type. And since there are many states where facilitators are perfectly legal and completely unregulated, experts expect the rip-offs to keep happening.

"People believe that if we license barbers and people who paint your toenails, there must be someone who licenses people who control something as important as adoption," says William Pierce, founding president of the National Council for Adoption. In fact, even states that outlaw or regulate facilitators find it is extremely difficult to enforce the rules, Pierce says. "It's easy money," says Jeanne Carroll, who claims she lost $15,500 to Furlow. "You're not dealing with selling a car. You're dealing with people's emotions."