Michigan woman pleads guilty in adoption scheme
iStock/junialNEW HAVEN, Mich. - A southeastern Michigan woman has pleaded guilty to fraud in a scheme to collect more than $260,000 from couples who wanted to adopt children. Prosecutors said she sometimes matched more than one set of adoptive parents to a birth mother and also matched couples to phony birth mothers. Lee, for example, admits that in June 2018 she told a client that a birth mother named RaShaunda had been shot and killed and the baby had died. Lee made up this story because RaShaunda did not exist," according to a plea agreement signed by Lee. In another case, a couple traveled from Colorado last year but was told that an adoption suddenly had failed because the birth mother had backed out.