Shady Child Adoptions in Guatemala

If you think about it, PAP's are not the only source of income for an agency.

Money laundering schemes often need a legitimate cover to keep them from obvious investigation.  What is more noble than saving orphaned/sickly children?  [Just think, these agencies don't even need an inventory of waiting children... they can just claim they provide certain services and pay as they greet their next investigation.] 

I found a great article that goes into more of the details that need to be ironed-out when considering money laundering:

classic money laundering--is to create a business to ostensibly earn that money. Any business that brings in a good deal of cash will do. You run the business as usual during the day. Then, after closing, you feed in your day's illicit receipts, pretending that they'd been received by the business. In due course the business pays its taxes and all the tax man can see is that you're running an unusually profitable business.

Now, the tax man may well take an interest in such a profitable business, so it's best if it'd be hard to prove that you couldn't be doing the business you're paying taxes on. A bar, for example, wouldn't be the best choice, because you wouldn't have ordered enough booze to pour all the drinks your books will say you've sold. Coin operated laundries and car washes are classics, because the only way to prove that you hadn't actually done all that business would be to have an undercover agent surveil your place for weeks, counting every coin inserted by every customer. (Although agents have been known to subpoena the water bill and try to make the case that way.)

Modern Money Laundering

The other thing sometimes called money laundering is when you have some big lump of cash that you'd rather not have people find out about. Sometimes it's an effort to keep the money from the tax man (literally the opposite of classic money laundering), other times the goal is to keep it from coming to the attention of someone else who might feel like they have some claim to the money--an ex-spouse, a creditor, the guy who owns the land where you found the bag of gold coins in the culvert.

In this kind of money laundering, the point is to make the money disappear. This is the sort of money laundering where you might make use of foreign banks, shell companies, and so on.

There are two parts to these strategies. First, you need to make the money disappear. Second, you need to make it reappear in some gradual fashion that doesn't bring it to the attention of whoever you're trying to hide it from.

Disappearing the money

The easiest way to disappear the money, especially if it's already cash (as opposed to, let's say, silver bullion or a winning lottery ticket) is to just stash it in a safety deposit box. You miss out on any investment income, but it's safe and you know where to find it.

If you really want to be able to invest the money, get it overseas. If it's an amount that you can just carry with you, buy a vacation package to the Cayman Islands or visit your family roots in Europe and take a little side trip to Switzerland or Austria or Liechtenstein.

There are plenty of fancy, complex ways to get the money overseas, that mostly require an accomplice. The most basic is an invoice scam. Establish a business that imports or exports something. Meet with your customer or supplier and arrange with him to either over-pay or under-bill, and then to have your counterpart deposit (most of) the excess into your foreign bank account. An ongoing scheme is good, because the guy knows that the lucrative cash flow will stop if you find out the money isn't getting deposited as it should, but you can also work this as a one-shot deal if your counterpart can be trusted.

Banks used to help their good customers get money discretely overseas, but nowadays there are a bunch of laws against such things, and bankers are particularly averse to going to jail for their customers. Expect them to refused to get involved and to rat you out.

Reappearing the money

Now we're basically back into classic money laundering territory.

If you stashed a duffel bag full of cash it in a safety deposit box (or under your bed), all you need to do is pull out a few bills now and then when you're heading out for a night on the town. You can raise your standard of living modestly. Alternatively, you could increase the amount that's going into your 401(k) and then use the cash to keep your standard of living about the same--gradually turning the hidden money into above-board money.

If you've got the money overseas somewhere, bring it back in some way that makes it legit. The easiest would be to create an overseas company that then hires you to do something. You do whatever it is and send an invoice whenever you want some cash. You can also reverse the invoice scam that let you get the money overseas in the first place--now you under-pay (or over-bill), while making up the difference out of your foreign bank account. A third option is a fake loan where you "borrow" the money and then simply fail to pay the money back. 

 [From "How to launder money", Sept 1, 2007, WiseBread http://www.wisebread.com/how-to-launder-money]

The rest of that article goes into the laws involved in these schemes.  I bet many can see how lucrative baby-selling can be, especially if a person is willing to dip a few toes into a little laundering pool.

Wow... that was one horrific article.  It actually reminded me of a back-alley abortion, only much MUCH worse.

There is so much to say in regards to that piece, but one thing that really stuck out like a cancerous tumor is this subtle connection made about supply, demand, and how easy it is to fall into the wrong hands when a child's life is placed in the care of a self-serving stranger.

Sandra Soria, executive director of Peru's nonprofit Institute for Infancy and the Family, said it is impossible to know how many children are sold each year, not only for adoption but also for forced labor and the sex trade.  [From:  "Teen's murder casts light on baby trafficking in Peru", March 13, 2006, http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20060313&slug=perubabies13]

Where is the morality in adoption if people are willing to break laws and stop at nothing -- (some will even kill a young pregnant woman) -- all for a baby?