http://www.soschildrensvillages.ca/news/news/orphan-charity-news/pages/increased-international-adoption-calls-for-the-use-of-%E2%80%9Csearchers%E2%80%9D-track-child-histories-139.aspx

Amidst widespread stories of coercion placed on women to give up their babies for adoptions, and even payments and abductions at the hands of brokers procuring adoptees for unwitting parents, more are looking to hire what's known as an adoption searcher.

Adoption searchers are specialized independent researchers working to track down the birth families of children adopted from other counties.

In Ethiopia alone the number of children adopted into foreign families in the U.S., Canada, and Europe has risen from just a few hundred several years ago to several thousand last year.

That increase has also brought stories of corruption, child trafficking, and fraud. Parents began to publicize the stories their adopted children told them when they learned English: that they had parents and families at home, who sometimes thought they were going to the U.S. to receive an education and then return.

Investigations have found evidence that adoption agencies had recruited children from intact families. Ethiopia's government found that some children's paperwork had been doctored to list children who had living parents as orphans instead, which allowed the agencies to avoid lengthy court vetting procedures.

The evidence seems to point to cases of fraud or corruption occurring at the local level, long before the adoption proceeded to the country's federal courts and oversight agencies.

In some cases other family relatives relinquish a child while their parents or caretakers are absent; sometimes all it takes are several witnessed claiming that the parents had died.

Tasked with determining whether an adopted child is a "manufactured orphan," the contradictions unearthed by searchers in recent years have damaged the reputations of adoption agencies in Ethiopia.

The main issue facing countries like Ethiopia is extreme poverty.

When people see birth families benefitting from their choice to relinquish their child, she said, that can have a contagious effect in these communities. "It takes over a whole village very quickly. It's very dangerous stuff, playing with people's poverty, emotions, and needs in a way that's really quite profound."