For Singaporean couple David and Ally — who asked the BBC to use pseudonyms to protect their case — the journey to parenthood ended in joy, only to be upended years later by a sprawling cross-border human trafficking investigation that now threatens to tear their family apart.
After years of struggling with infertility and multiple devastating miscarriages, the couple turned to international adoption when domestic adoption waiting lists left them waiting years for a child. Like roughly two-thirds of adoptive families in Singapore, they looked to neighboring Indonesia, working with a local agency that specialized in placing Indonesian infants with Singaporean parents. Within weeks, they connected with an infant named Marcus over a video call, and David says he felt an immediate connection: “It was love at first sight.”
The couple paid tens of thousands of dollars in fees, which they were told covered legal costs, agency services, infant care expenses, and a nominal token payment to Marcus’s biological parents. A few months later, Marcus arrived in Singapore, and his adoption was quickly approved by Singaporean authorities. The couple’s next step was applying for citizenship, a process they expected to go smoothly after all required checks had been completed. Instead, immigration officials suspended their application and informed them Marcus was likely one of at least 20 infants trafficked illegally from Indonesia to Singapore for adoption.
The revelation came after Indonesian authorities broke up a major trafficking ring centered in West Java, where 19 people — most of them women — are currently on trial for their alleged roles in the scheme. Prosecutors accuse the ring, led by Indonesian woman Lie Siu Luan, of sourcing at least 20 infants from vulnerable biological parents, forging fake adoption and birth documents, and smuggling the babies to Singapore for thousands of dollars per child. Court documents reveal Lie admitted supplying infants to Singaporean contacts for at least S$17,000 (US$13,000) each, and coordinated a network of brokers who recruited expecting parents on social media, nannies to care for infants before transfer, and document forgers to create fake legal paperwork. In one documented case, a broker posed as a prospective adopter to trick an unemployed, bankrupt father into giving up his newborn son for a cash payment.
Indonesian law defines the purchase and cross-border transfer of a child for exploitation as human trafficking, and the ring stands accused of bypassing the country’s strict formal transnational adoption processes entirely. Prosecutors are seeking prison sentences of between five and 10 years for all 19 defendants.
The BBC’s independent investigation confirmed Marcus is indeed listed as one of the trafficked infants in Indonesian court documents, and the fake adoption paperwork lists one of the defendants on trial as his biological mother. The Singaporean adoption agency that connected David and Ally to Marcus is the same agency identified by Interpol’s Indonesian branch as linked to the ring, and remains a registered active business in Singapore; the BBC has not received a response to multiple requests for comment from the agency’s owner.
The case has sparked urgent questions about how Singapore — a country renowned for its strict regulatory controls and rigorous border screening — failed to detect the illegal trafficking ring and formally approved multiple adoptions arranged by the syndicate. Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs has declined to comment on ongoing investigations into the agency and alleged Singaporean co-conspirators, citing active Indonesian court proceedings, and confirmed that the Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) are cooperating with Indonesian authorities to support the investigation.
Lawmakers have raised repeated questions about the case in Singapore’s parliament, noting that the adoptions were approved on the recommendation of government officials, and that the adoptive parents are innocent parties who followed all legal requirements to the letter. However, the MSF has pushed back, arguing that adoption agencies bear primary responsibility for verifying the legitimacy of child origins and conducting rigorous background checks, and that adoptive parents also share a duty of due diligence.
David and Ally reject this argument, saying they had no reason to suspect any wrongdoing as first-time adoptive parents who relied on government-approved vetting processes. “The officials are the experts on this, to see whether this is legitimate. They deal with so many adoptions, day in day out. Not us,” Ally told the BBC. The MSF has declined to answer questions about how it conducts vetting for foreign adoptions, but has confirmed it is providing support to affected families, processing of citizenship applications has been delayed, and it will launch a full review of Singapore’s international adoption procedures.
The case also lays bare a growing child trafficking crisis across Indonesia, where official data shows the number of trafficked young children nearly tripled between 2021 and 2024, rising from 27 reported cases to 70. Child rights activists stress this is almost certainly an undercount, as many cases go unreported. The West Java ring is just one of at least seven large baby trafficking syndicates dismantled by Indonesian authorities in recent years; another syndicate based in Yogyakarta was found to have handled at least 66 infants.
Traffickers exploit systemic gaps and deep-rooted social challenges in Indonesia to operate, activists say. Many biological parents who give up their infants do so out of extreme poverty, while others are coerced by traffickers. Cultural stigma around children born out of wedlock, limited access to social safety nets, and a lack of formal, safe facilities for parents to surrender unwanted children — such as the “baby boxes” common in many other countries — have created a vacuum that unregulated black market trafficking fills. Traffickers often frame their operations as a form of altruism helping struggling families, and many defendants, including Lie, claim they did not know their actions were illegal.
“It’s not just a matter of finding out who’s selling the babies and then punishing them,” explained Eko Kriswanto, a West Java-based child rights activist. “The main problem is that children end up being treated as commodities. So what must be explored is the cause.” While Indonesia has strong legal protections for children against trafficking, inconsistent enforcement remains a major barrier, he added. Ai Rahmayanti, head of the independent Indonesian Commission for Child Protection, noted that the absence of formal safe surrender services has allowed traffickers to operate openly on social media, offering expecting parents cash and free medical care in exchange for their infants.
As the West Java trial progresses, the most pressing unanswered question remains: what will become of the 12 children already believed to be in Singapore, including Marcus, all of whom have now spent most of their lives with their adoptive Singaporean families? Indonesian officials and activists have argued as a matter of principle that the children should be returned to their biological families in Indonesia, with one police official calling the issue a matter of “Indonesia’s national pride.” But child development experts warn that removing children from the only stable home they have ever known would cause severe, long-term harm.
“The stress of multiple disruptions early in a child’s life could negatively affect brain development, emotional regulation, learning and attachment security,” explained Jeremy Heng, a senior clinical psychologist with the Singapore Children’s Society, adding that uprooting the children would increase their risk of lifelong trauma and mental health challenges. Indonesian foreign ministry spokesperson Yvonne Mewengkang told the BBC the country would prioritize “child protection based on the principle of the best interests of the child,” but neither Indonesian nor Singaporean authorities have publicly confirmed what final decision will be made about the children’s futures.
For David and Ally, the months of waiting have been agonizing, with constant anxiety hanging over their family. “There’s always the thought that Marcus might be taken away,” David said. The couple have vowed to exhaust every legal option to keep Marcus, and if he is ordered to return to Indonesia, David says he will pursue a full, legal adoption from there. “I will not give up on him,” he said. “Any parent would fight till the end.”