'We thought we were adopting twins, but the woman was lying the whole time'
“Looking back, we said a couple of times ‘this is too good to be true’, and it was,” the heartbroken dad says about their harrowing ordeal.
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An American couple have shared their experience of falling prey to an adoption scam.
Bella and Dallin Lambert, who run YouTube channel Della Vlogs to more than 1.4m subscribers, shared a video simply titled Our Adoption was a Scam on May 24 which has already amassed 1.6m views.
In the video, the couple say they were planning to adopt after going through infertility struggles over the past five years.
They’d tried IVF and other alternative options, but eventually settled on adoption as the best way to have a child.
They found a woman claiming to be a 20-year-old university student from California who was due to give birth to “identical twin girls”.
“We were very excited because we always dreamed of having twins,” Bella said in the video.
She goes on to say twin adoptions can be a red flag as they are “few and far between”, and it’s a common tactic for scammers to use.
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"We said a couple of times 'this is too good to be true'"
They began to talk to the woman, and Dallin said the texts between the two parties “just seemed so perfect”.
“Looking back, we said a couple of times ‘this is too good to be true’, and it was,” he said.
“The messages she would send us were so profound, so in depth and so full of love. She would say things that would make us so happy and so excited, I couldn’t imagine she was lying to us.”
The couple then flew out to southern California from Arizona to meet the woman, and Bella said she told the couple they would be “perfect parents”.
“She wanted us to adopt them, and she had tears in her eyes telling us she’d been praying to find people like us, and we were a miracle for her,” she said.
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"I haven't gone into the nursery since we found out"
The woman then encouraged the couple to get their nursery ready to make her feel “more comfortable”, a move Bella now describes as “cruel”.
“It’s the most awful thing ever,” she said. “I wish we hadn’t got that nursery ready, because now we have it sitting there with all the stuff, and I haven’t gone into the nursery since we found out it was a scam.
“It’s tainted our experience of getting our baby’s nursery ready.”
Dallin said the woman also encouraged them to do a gender reveal.
“She felt like she was going to miss out on a lot of the good and fun things that happen during pregnancy, like a baby shower and a gender reveal. She said she’d love to be included and be a part of that, and we thought that was cool,” he said.
“I feel dumb, but I trusted this girl so much. I feel so stupid for believing her and throwing that gender reveal,” Bella said.
“We wanted to make it special because we’d been waiting to celebrate these babies for about five years now, so the whole family was so excited. Being able to tell them was so special, and all these moments have been tainted now.”
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"I can't believe she'd manipulate someone like that"
Dallin then said the woman asked the couple to do birthing classes with her and “be in the hospital room with her”.
“We thought that’d be so special,” he said. “She said she didn’t have much support at home, and we’d be the only people there to support her during her birth.”
The couple found a birthing coach and booked private birthing classes to meet with her and the coach for nine weeks.
The woman even went as far as speaking to the couple’s adoption agency over the phone, but the couple said she would push back any in-person meeting.
“Something would always come up,” Bella said. “She did officially agree to go to one of those appointments, and it was a couple of days before we found out what happened.”
“The excuses she had for not going into the agency were so real and so thought out that we believed them, and we shouldn’t have,” Dallin said. “She said the pregnancy was non-consensual, and she had trauma and PTSD from that.
“I can’t believe she’d make that up and use that story to manipulate someone like that.”
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"I knew in the back of my head something was wrong"
The couple then received an email from another couple saying the same woman had shared videos of their gender reveal with several families thinking they also had a chance to adopt her twins.
“I was still in a bit of denial and didn’t want to believe it, but I knew in the back of my head something was wrong,” Dallin said.
Bella got an Instagram DM from the same person who sent the email, and she said she knew then it was “serious”.
“We were crushed to find out she’d been talking to this family for two months,” Bella said.
Dallin then said the other family had had the same experience as them: the woman had also asked them to set up a nursery and a gender reveal.
The couple then shared a photo of the woman to a Facebook page called “ending adoption scams” to find out if she’d been speaking to any other families, and “multiple other people” started commenting saying they were also talking to her.
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"It's sickening somebody could do this to multiple families"
Dallin and Bella then compared photos of the woman with other affected couples, and realised they’d been scammed when they found inconsistencies between her stories.
The woman had sent a cropped photo to the couple saying she was 26-weeks pregnant, but had sent the same photo uncropped to another couple which pictured her with a completely flat stomach.
The couple then confronted the woman over a phone call, who tried to play it off as an “old photo” even though she was wearing a gift they had given her a week earlier.
“I don’t know why somebody would fake pregnancy, go through eight hours of birthing classes, and tell us to fly out there and meet up with them,” Dallin said.
Thankfully, Bella said there was no money exchanged with the woman, but she said that made it more confusing as she “doesn’t know what her intentions were”.
“I feel so gross about it, and it’s so sickening somebody could do this to multiple families,” Bella said.
“I feel so anxious and scared putting this out there because it’s very raw. I’m grieving, I’m really having a hard time, but I appreciate the sweet comments from people because this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through in my life.”
Originally published as 'We thought we were adopting twins, but the woman was lying the whole time'
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