With Westerners willing to spend thousands of dollars to adopt a child, there is a monetary incentive to extend the laundering ring from the middle classes to societies' more affluent groups.
[2] Often, the people involved in recruiting and managing these rings are local middle or upper class citizens who have a negative view of the impoverished.
The process begins when recruiters gain physical custody of children, who are then often taken to orphanages which arrange the adoptions, where they are sometimes severely mistreated.
If these initial efforts to locate the family fail, or are declared as failures, the institution then has the opportunity to capitalize on this by putting the child up for adoption.
[2] After investigations, United States ICE agents observed inhumane conditions in many foreign orphanages involved in child laundering.
[6] In many cases, the prospective adoptive parents are motivated by a sense of altruism and white saviorism, coupled with their desire to overcome infertility and fulfill the Western standard of the nuclear family.
[7] These adoptive parents create a demand for healthy infants that will be able to assimilate into their new home, cutting off ties to their birthplace and culture of origin.
However, this Act is limited in the fact that the United States cannot enforce any measures against the country of origin if corruption in the adoption process is discovered.
The recruiters are called jaladoras or buscadoras, and often work with medical personnel who give them information about the locations of vulnerable women.
Additionally, foster care is now accountable to the Secretaria de Binestar Social, and the Central Authority (CA) was established in order to ensure Guatemala's compliance with Hague Convention rules.
The official statistics are based only on those cases which have been resolved,[clarify] but it is very difficult to prove that any individual child has been kidnapped and then laundered.
argue that the issue of child laundering in China stems from the one-child policy, which created what was once a surplus of children needing adoption.
LICADHO, a Cambodian human rights group, has said that recruiters target poor women and families in their efforts to gain access to young children.
[20] One particular case that gained media attention focused on a child laundering scheme run by American Lauryn Galindo.
Galindo was prosecuted in the United States and convicted of "material misrepresentations as to the orphan status and identities" of infant adoptees over the period of 1997 through 2001.
Between 1970 and 2017, 11,000 babies from Sri Lanka were exported to Western Countries, mainly those in Europe, including The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and Germany.
Many hospitals in Sri Lanka, especially those in districts like Ratnapura, Galle, Kandy, Colombo, Kegalle and Kalutara, either stole infants or coerced mothers into putting their children up for adoption.
Government officials, tour guides, lawyers, and medical staff have all been implicated in unethical international adoption scandals; the babies were bought for around $30 and then sold to foreign couples for double the amount.