“cryptic clinics”: Fake-pregnancy baby-trafficking scam in Nigeria

[Anonymous]

Fake-pregnancy baby-trafficking scam in Nigeria

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78dyryreyxo

excerpt (but the full article has more to this wild story):

Scammers posing as doctors or nurses convince women that they have a “miracle fertility treatment” guaranteed to get them pregnant. The initial “treatment” usually costs hundreds of dollars and consists of an injection, a drink, or a substance inserted into the vagina.

They led to changes in their bodies - such as swollen stomachs - which further convinced them they were pregnant.

Women given the “treatment” are warned not to visit any conventional doctors or hospitals, as no scan or pregnancy test would detect “the baby”, which the scammers claim is growing outside the womb.

When it’s time to “deliver” the baby, women are told labour will only begin once they are induced with a “rare and expensive drug”, requiring further payment.

Some are sedated only to wake up with a Caesarean-like incision mark. Others say they are given an injection that causes a drowsy, hallucinatory state in which they believe they’re giving birth.

Either way, the women end up with babies they are supposed to have given birth to.

This so-called "Dr Ruth" runs her clinic every second Saturday of the month in a dilapidated hotel in the town of Ihiala, in the south-eastern Anambra state. Outside her room, dozens of women wait for her in the hotel corridors, some with visibly protruding stomachs.

She offers the woman an injection, claiming it will enable the couple to “select” the sex of their future baby - a medical impossibility.