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A 43-year-old woman from China was recently arrested after attempting to buy a baby on the internet. The unnamed woman, from Chizhou in Anhui province, has spent the past couple of years looking for a child she could adopt.
This dream came close to being realized when she joined an online chat group which assists parents in adopting abandoned babies, according to Kankanews.com via South China Morning Post on Sept. 24. The woman reportedly paid over 70,000 yuan ($10, 200) to the online group’s administrator and set up a meeting with him in Zhejiang province to get the 4-month-old baby girl.
Authorities said the baby’s mother asked the administrator to find a family “in a better economic position” for her child. The mother, however, was unaware that the group was making profits by adopting off children.
When the woman arrived to Zhejiang province with her brother to claim the child, they were both arrested by the police. The online group’s administrator was also arrested and was discovered to have been allegedly involved in six other cases of similar nature.
The woman has since defended herself, saying that she did not know it was illegal to adopt through an “online broker.”
“If I had known it’s illegal, I would not have done this kind of thing,” she said in the report. “We are just ordinary people. [We did this] because in the past, among our friends and relatives, a lot of them paid money to adopt kids.” Cody Cepeda/JB
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