Taylor Stein, the mother of a child with Estée Lauder’s William Lauder, wanted a sibling for her kid, but adoption was proving difficult, so she turned to surrogates. Stein was told by an agency that the intended parents of a unborn child had backed out, and she could have the baby, just like that. “I said, ‘This is crazy. Does this happen often?’ She said, ‘Yes,’” Stein recalls to the New York Post today. The donors even looked ideal — “two Texan kids, these blond, blue-eyed, perfect kids” — but in fact, the whole thing was a massive international wire-fraud scam with “fictitious egg and sperm donors,” girls being impregnated in Ukraine, and very little medical oversight. Stein went on to wear a wire for the FBI and bust the whole ring, and now she is planning a documentary about the process called White Collar, Black Market — the Surrogacy Loophole. Oh, and she got to keep the baby they sold her. These things just seem to have a funny way of working out!
