The Greek media report on a baby trafficking ring busted on August 8 on the island of Crete. The illegal activities of the criminal group included illegal surrogacy, adoptions, egg donation and apparent in vitro procedures at a fertility clinic in the city of Chania, Crete island, Greece.
Among the dozens of women who were exploited by the criminal group as surrogate mothers and egg donors, there were also Bulgarian women.
The Greek police stated that the organized crime group involving doctors and other medical personnel was broken up on the morning of August 8 in an operation carried out in Crete, Athens and Thessaloniki.
The leader of the criminal group was a 73-year-old gynecologist, founder and manager of the clinic. Together with the organization's second-in-command, a 44-year-old embryologist, he recruited middlemen in Crete, Thessaloniki, as well as abroad, to locate and obtain consent from vulnerable female foreign nationals to transfer to Greece and exploit them as egg donors or surrogate mothers.
Through the exploitation of women, the clinic fulfilled the "orders" of clients from all over the world (couples with reproductive problems, single men or homosexual couples) who did not fulfill the legal prerequisites for adoption.
The women were then either primed to be egg donors for in vitro fertilization and surrogacy programs; were housed in facilities controlled by the criminal organization to carry out surrogacy pregnancies for a fee; or both.
In cases of interested parents from countries where the surrogacy procedure is prohibited, the births were declared as adoptions.
Some detained members of the group acted as intermediaries in adoptions for a fee, and also systematically committed fraud by deceiving women into undergoing embryo transfer procedures.
The organization is believed to have been in business for a decade. Since December 2022 alone, at least 71 female egg donors have been identified, some of whom have been exploited more than once; 98 women exploited as surrogate mothers; 13 cases of illegal acquisition of a child through a surrogacy program; 4 illegal adoptions; 400 cases of fraud and causing physical harm to female patients through bogus IVF procedures in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
The group earned between EUR 70,000 and EUR 100,000 from the children born to the surrogate mothers, and in some cases up to EUR 120,000. In addition, it is estimated that the fictitious in vitro procedures brought a profit of around EUR 120,000.
Police reported that during the operation, 30 foreign women who were either egg donors or pregnant surrogate mothers were found in various homes in Chania. They have since been provided with psychological and other support by the Greek state and a non-governmental organization.
According to information on the local information portal cretalive.gr, the 30 women found in the homes were from Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Romania and Bulgaria. They were in serious financial trouble when they were contacted by members of the criminal group. When they arrived they were placed under constant surveillance and paid around EUR 600 per month.
A couple who almost fell victim to the group told Alpha TV about the huge sums charged, from EUR 70,000 for a baby, to EUR 7,000-9,000 for fertilized eggs, if the couple could not fertilize their own. The couple suspected that their own egg fertilization procedure was a sham, and their two fertilized eggs had become object of trade.
However, the break-up of the criminal group has raised the question of what will happen to the legal procedures carried out by the Chania IVF centre. The President. Hellenic National Authority for Medically Assisted Reproduction, Nikolaos Vrahnis, stated that his service is in continuous contact with the deputy scientific head of the centre in Crete and the rest of the staff, to take the necessary measures to preserve the genetic material from patients, which is kept frozen in the cryogenic bank in Chania. He also assured that all the medical procedures under development would be completed.
Vrahnis also said that since May 2021, when the supervisory board of the National Authority was established, there have been no complaints against the centre in Chania.
On Saturday, however, Greek Minister of Health Michalis Chrysochoidis relieved Vrahnis of his post because of the case in Crete.
/DT/
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