Audio Transcript

Mollie Halpern: The FBI puts a stop to a baby-selling ring involving a prominent attorney and two other women.

Jeffrey Veltri: This was probably the most depraved set of facts we’ve ever come across.

Halpern: I’m Mollie Halpern of the FBI, and this is Gotcha. A surrogacy is an arrangement between a person unable to have their own child and another person who will carry the child for them. In order for this to be legal, a contract must be reached between the intended parents and the surrogate before a pregnancy occurs. In this case, surrogates were recruited to travel to Ukraine to get implanted with embryos by anonymous donors without intended parents. Supervisory Special Agent Jeffrey Veltri…

Veltri: She wasn’t really selling the services of the woman who was carrying the child to term—she was selling a child.

Halpern: The attorney filed fraudulent documents to the court saying the process was legal. The break in the case came when one of the surrogates became suspicious of the process and worked with our agents.

Veltri: We began to do consensually recorded conversations against our subjects.

Halpern: The investigation resulted in prison time for all three women. This is the FBI’s closed case of the week.