Two Infant Brokers Sentenced to 21 and 23 Years in Prison Respectively
A mother who sold her newborn baby in Vietnam, claiming it was difficult to raise the child, and brokers who bought and resold the babies were sentenced to prison.
According to local media VN Express on the 23rd (local time), the Binh Duong Provincial People's Court in southern Vietnam fined five women who bought newborns 40 million dong each (about 2.14 million KRW). The court explained that it considered their difficult circumstances, their first offenses, and their lack of legal knowledge.
Two brokers, Phuong (42) and Nhu (31), who led the newborn trafficking, were sentenced to 23 years and 21 years in prison respectively on charges of trafficking children and adolescents under 16 and document forgery. They were found guilty of gathering mothers who intended to sell their babies through social networking services (SNS), buying each newborn for 10 to 30 million dong (about 530,000 to 1.6 million KRW), and reselling them for over 40 million dong.
They were also investigated for purchasing fake birth certificates, adoption consent forms, and DNA test results for about 2 to 7 million dong (about 110,000 to 370,000 KRW) per document to disguise the transactions as legal adoptions.
Investigations revealed that Phuong sold at least five newborns from November 2021 to August 2022, earning illegal profits of 70 million dong (about 3.74 million KRW). Nhu also sold five newborns, making a profit of 40 million dong.
Additionally, eight mothers who sold their babies received prison sentences ranging from 5 to 9 years. They claimed that they sold their babies due to extreme financial hardship, having many children already and being unable to raise the newborns, or because the pregnancies were unexpected out-of-wedlock.
Meanwhile, a so-called 'infant broker' case involving the buying and selling of newborns recently occurred in South Korea as well. On the 23rd, the Incheon District Court (Criminal Division 9, Judge Kang Tae-ho) sentenced A (25, female), an infant broker charged with child trafficking under the Child Welfare Act, to 1 year and 2 months in prison.
Four accomplices, including B (27, female), the biological mother who sold her newborn daughter, and C (53, female), who paid money to broker A to receive B’s daughter, were each sentenced to 6 months in prison with a 2-year probation.
Broker A visited the hospital where B was admitted in August 2019, paid B’s hospital bill of 980,000 KRW, and took B’s 6-day-old daughter. Later, A met C at a cafe, handed over B’s daughter, and received 3 million KRW.
A was investigated for approaching C, who wanted to adopt, pretending to be the biological mother and receiving money under the pretext of hospital and postpartum care expenses. When C had difficulty registering B’s daughter as her own child, she eventually abandoned the baby in a baby box, and the child was later adopted by another family.
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