A baby trafficking Singapore adoption scandal is threatening to tear apart families who say they had no idea the children they raised for years may have been illegally bought from Indonesia. David and Ally, a Singaporean couple using pseudonyms to protect their case, say they fell instantly in love with their son Marcus after seeing him on a video call arranged through an adoption agency, only to later learn he may be one of at least 20 infants trafficked into Singapore.
“For me it was love at first sight,” David told the BBC, describing the moment they first saw the baby who would become their son. Years after bringing Marcus home, the family now faces the agonizing possibility that authorities could decide he should be returned to his biological parents in Indonesia rather than remain with the only family he has known.
Nearly two dozen people have been arrested and 19 are currently on trial in West Java, accused of illegally purchasing babies and funneling forged paperwork through the adoption system to make the transactions appear legitimate. Under Indonesian law, paying for a child and transferring them for exploitation qualifies as human trafficking, and prosecutors say the defendants deliberately circumvented the country’s strict rules governing international adoptions.
David and Ally had struggled with infertility after Ally endured several miscarriages, and turned to overseas adoption after facing a lengthy waitlist in Singapore, where roughly two-thirds of adopted children are born abroad. They paid tens of thousands of dollars to a local agency specializing in Indonesian adoptions, money they were told covered legal fees, agency costs, and a “token sum” for the birth parents.
Everything appeared to proceed normally, with Marcus’s adoption approved and the family preparing to finalize his citizenship, until immigration officials abruptly told them the application was suspended over suspicions he had been trafficked. “That’s when I burst,” David recalled, saying he confronted officials over why their supposedly rigorous vetting process had failed to catch the alleged fraud. “They could not answer us.”
Court documents reviewed by the BBC list Marcus’s full Indonesian name among the allegedly trafficked infants, and a woman currently on trial for falsely posing as birth mothers is named as his mother on his adoption paperwork. Indonesia’s branch of Interpol has also linked the same Singaporean adoption agency that placed Marcus to the trafficking network, though the agency has not responded to the BBC’s attempts to reach its owner.
Prosecutors allege the trafficking ring was led by an Indonesian woman named Lie Siu Luan, who has admitted supplying babies to at least four Singaporean contacts in exchange for payments of at least 18,000 Singapore dollars, roughly $14,000, per child. She is accused of orchestrating a network of brokers who scoured social media for parents willing to give up their infants, sometimes using deceptive tactics, before housing the babies with hired nannies and forging birth certificates ahead of adoption.
At least 12 of the 20 babies named in the case had already been brought into Singapore, according to testimony in the West Java trial, though Singaporean authorities declined to confirm the figure to the BBC. Prosecutors are seeking prison sentences of five to ten years for those involved.
Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs declined to say whether it was investigating the agency or Lie’s alleged local collaborators, citing the ongoing Indonesian court proceedings, while the Ministry of Social and Family Development said adoption agencies bear responsibility for verifying that children come from legitimate sources. Lawmakers in Singapore’s parliament have pushed back, noting that adoptive families like David and Ally followed every legal step they were told to follow.
“The officials are the experts on this, to see whether this is legitimate,” said Ally. “They deal with so many adoptions, day in day out. Not us.” The ministry has pointed to prior statements acknowledging delays in citizenship processing and has promised a formal review of its adoption procedures.
The West Java case is one of at least seven suspected baby trafficking networks Indonesian authorities have investigated in recent years, including one operation in Yogyakarta allegedly linked to 66 babies. Government figures show trafficked children nearly tripled from 27 to 70 between 2021 and 2024, though the real number is believed to be far higher.
Some birth parents were coerced, while others sold their children out of desperation. Dani Hidayat, a witness in the trial, testified that he agreed to give up his newborn son after falling into poverty, receiving a partial payment before growing suspicious and alerting police, a decision that helped expose the broader network. His son was eventually recovered and remains in state care, though he was not among the babies sent to Singapore.
Child rights advocates say the case reflects deeper failures in Indonesia’s social safety net. “It’s not just a matter of finding out who’s selling the babies and then punishing them,” said Eko Kriswanto, a child rights activist in West Java, adding that children are being treated as commodities and the underlying causes need urgent attention. Ai Rahmayanti of the Indonesian Commission for Child Protection said the state has failed to build safe alternatives for parents wanting to surrender children, leaving traffickers to fill the gap by openly advertising payment in exchange for newborns on social media.
