Fake ultrasounds, fake bellies and ‘Fake a Baby.com’ gets Michigan teen in non-fake trouble
Updated
“Need a bun in the oven?” says the Web site “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 Fox2 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 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 unraveled.
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 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 colors.
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.”
The company got mentioned on NPR’s “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!,” in a story about some Chinese women who, in an effort to get seats on crowded Beijing subways, pretended to be pregnant using fake bellies apparently purchased from the company. The ruse came to an end when one of the fake stomachs “fell to the ground” in front of some subway passengers.
Wyandotte Police Chief Daniel J. Grant confirmed to the Post the TV station’s account of the story but said, “quite frankly, we’re not doing a lot” with the case. “We have no complainant. What she did, she doesn’t deny …. What she did was certainly wrong. But we’ve got no complainant that’s come forward yet and said they donated money and want to charge her with fraud.”
Fred Barbash, the editor of Morning Mix, is a former National Editor and London Bureau Chief for the Washington Post.