THE RISING PRICE OF BABIES
After her contact with these adoption agents, Lily purportedly looked for more babies to be adopted, enlisting the help of other defendants who allegedly acted as recruiters, caretakers as well as document forgers to obscure the babies’ origins.
The suspected syndicate members trawled through social media and joined several online adoption groups looking for parents hoping to give up their newborns, the majority of whom were from the Bandung area of West Java.
To sweeten the deal, the recruiters allegedly provided between 9 million rupiah and 15 million rupiah to parents.
“The birth parents were under the impression that their children would be adopted by the defendants and they would still have some contact with their children many years down the line,” Sukanda said.
“They did not know that their babies would be sold to other couples let alone trafficked to another country.”
Once they had the babies, the alleged syndicate reportedly forged birth certificates, listing several defendants as fake birth parents or guardians.
These forged documents allowed the babies to have passports and other forms of identification and for Singaporean adoption papers to be filled out and processed.
According to court records, Lily told the judges that prices for the 12 babies trafficked to Singapore increased from S$17,000 to S$19,000, to S$20,000 eventually reaching S$21,600.
Lily, the court records show, allegedly pocketed S$2,000 to S$3,000 each time, with the rest used to pay her crew and other expenses like food, accommodation and plane tickets.
The prosecution was supposed to present its final arguments and sentence recommendations against the 19 defendants on Tuesday but the trial was postponed to Jun 18. No official explanation was given for the postponement.
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