Scammer
Banned
An ad on a popular P.E.I. buy-and-sell site offering a baby boy for adoption has turned out to be a scam, RCMP say.
Tim and Stephanie Sock, who have adopted a child and are in the process of adopting another, discovered the ad while online recently looking to buy a pet.
The ad, which appears on the website Mercattel, appears to offer a P.E.I. baby up for adoption but no names are given.
The Socks immediately called the RCMP.
The Mounties responded by email to the ad as a prospective parent, RCMP spokesman Denis Morin said Monday.
What they got back was a story about a mother who had suffered a tragedy and wanted to give up her baby. It was written in broken English with lots of spelling mistakes and no specifics as to where on P.E.I. the family lives.
"It's very unusual for any parents who are putting their child up for adoption, to put it on the internet," Morin said.
"Well, from there, we were able to find out that the IP address came from Cameroon, Africa, so again, that raised other flags."
Wendy McCourt, director of child protection for P.E.I., said there's an easy way to check to determine whether such an ad is a scam because all adoptions have to go through the provincial government.
"I find that very sad, and it's just such an inappropriate thing to do," she said. "I would be aware of any child that a plan of adoption was being made for, or that anybody's looking for adoption."
The Socks know all about that: IIt took more than a year to adopt their six-year-old daughter Dee Dee. They're in the process of adopting their second daughter, Mary Jane, 5.
They also know desperate couples could be taken in by an ad like this.
"That's their way in to get a child, in their minds. I think if we didn't have children and we didn't know the system, we probably would have tried for that — if we were still desperate enough to become parents," Tim Sock said.
Police don't think anyone on P.E.I. has fallen for the scam.
"It would be so unfortunate to see somebody go through that, dish out the money, and then in the end result have no child," Stephanie Sock said.
RCMP said variations of the advertisement have have appeared on websites all across Canada, and Phonebusters, the federal government's anti-fraud centre, is in the process of taking them down.
