Fake a Baby website probed after scam
Teen duped family, boyfriend, church, and many donors
“Need a bun in the oven?” says the website Fake a Baby.com. “We can help.” Billing itself as the “Home of the $9.95 fake Ultrasound,” it purports to sell the “Best Gag Gifts on Earth.”
But according to Fox 2 News in Wyandotte, Mich., nobody in that town thinks it’s funny that a teenage girl pretended for months that she was pregnant with triplets, no less, using Fake a Baby products.
As word of her impending good fortune spread on Facebook — through a group she joined called Moms of Triplets — gifts started “pouring in,” according to the station.
A church got involved, a nonprofit group in Dearborn, Mich., chipped in and relatives threw her a baby shower.
“She got tons of help,” Jessica Adams, an aunt, told the station. “The gifts, they couldn’t even open at the shower there was so much.”
She looked pregnant, too. Her abdomen expanded appropriately.
She had ultrasound pictures confirming the triplets. And her 16-year old boyfriend, informed that he was about to become the father of three, was “excited,” or at least said he was, but also a little “scared.”
“I started looking for jobs the best I could,” he told the station, WJBK.
The young man’s mother started to get suspicious, however, when she could not locate the doctor who was supposedly tending to her son’s girlfriend.
And things got really strange when, even after 10 months, not a single baby — let alone three of them — arrived.
“Ten months?” the station’s reporter asked the young man. “I mean, she would have had the baby by then.”
“That’s what I thought too,” he responded.
Asked why he hadn’t grown suspicious at that point, the young man said “she gave me the story of micro preemies and how her doctor thought time would be better in there than time in the incubator.”
It happened, the station reported, that the young woman had posted pictures of her ultrasound on the Moms of Triplets Facebook page, where someone discovered the photos were identical to ultrasound images of triplets sold on Fake a Baby.com and got in touch with the family. The story quickly unravelled. Now, the station said, the local police are involved. Meanwhile, attention has focused on Fake a Baby.com.
Its wares include the “Silicon (sic) Fake Pregnancy Belly-Twins,” reduced in price from $299.95 US to $149.99; the “Silicon Fake Pregnancy Belly” for the “20 to 25 week stage to the 38 weeks stage,” and “Silicone Breast Pushups” in a variety of colours.
And, of course, “Fake Ultrasound Sonograms, Personalized,” and “personalized fake prescription” bottles.
Fake a Baby.com, has been in the news at least once before — in a felony spousal abuse case reported by the Bakersfield Californian back in 2013. A local correctional officer was charged with abuse after he discovered his girlfriend lied about being pregnant using an ultrasound from Fake a Baby.com.
The judge dismissed the case, noting, as the paper reported, that the woman “wasn’t the most credible of witnesses.”
Neither the company in question nor the Wyandotte police returned calls requesting comment.