Can I trust you?
July 18, 2016 10:46 AM   Subscribe

Stealing Hope: A longread series from the Charleston Post & Courier on a group of "emotional scammers" preying on increasingly desperate adoptive parents. (Design Warning: All Links Contain Autoplaying Animations)
posted by Potomac Avenue (5 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm really confused. Is the whole article literally three pages (one intro, two different scam stories), with a different title animation in each that takes up so much screenspace you don't even notice at first that there's a scrolldown to text?
posted by praemunire at 10:54 AM on July 18, 2016


No, if you click on the "longread series" link here, you can click on the "Stealing Hope" at the top of the page and then click on the "longread" button. I agree that this is not the ideal format for the story.

But once again, it really shocks me that adoption - serious business! - is so poorly regulated. It ought not to be private at all - $30,000 agency fees and $399 scammy-website fees are equally terrible for slightly different reasons.

I am really, really not liking this reality right now, and would like to go on to the next universe to see if that one is any better.
posted by Frowner at 11:33 AM on July 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Thanks. I still had to click around from there, but I think (?) I got the whole article.
posted by praemunire at 11:52 AM on July 18, 2016


I know that this is probably not illegal (unless there is money involved) but it does harm. Does that make this practice a tort? IANAL and am just asking.
posted by CCBC at 2:53 AM on July 19, 2016


Awful interface for a straight forward story. Huge gap purposefully left in the story about foster care, single parenting, open adoptions behind this shrinking chase for private infant adoptions.

But - I'd rather have more adoptive parents looking for kids than the reverse, that's a better reality by far. It isn't, not really -there are kids, but they're kids who need way more resources or come with birth family connections that can't be severed completely, etc.

This is selectively framed journalism. The scammers are run of the mill con-artists in a really shady industry, not evil masterminds robbing cradles.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 5:27 AM on July 20, 2016


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