The Notarized Handoff: How America Lets Parents Give Away Adopted Children to Strangers — Subsidy Checks and All

In the United States, a parent who wants to get rid of a dog must generally go through a shelter, sign paperwork, and sometimes pay a surrender fee. A parent who wants to get rid of an adopted child can do it faster, with less scrutiny, and — in a cruel twist of federal policy — sometimes while continuing to collect a government subsidy for the child they just handed away. Across much of the country, an adoptive parent can transfer permanent physical custody of a traumatized 12-year-old to a stranger met a week earlier in a Facebook group, seal the arrangement with a $10 notarized power of attorney, and walk away with no home study, no background check, no court hearing, no agency notified, and no crime committed. The practice is called "rehoming," and more than a decade after a Pulitzer-finalist Reuters investigation exposed it as a pipeline funneling children to pedophiles and abusers, the federal government still collects no systematic data on how many children disappear into it, no federal statute criminalizes the transfer itself, and — as of 2025 — 33 states still have no law specifically forbidding it.

How the Mechanism Actually Works

The rehoming machinery runs on a single legal instrument: the power of attorney (POA). In every state, a parent can execute a POA delegating caregiving authority over a child to another adult — a legitimate tool meant for deployed soldiers, hospitalized parents, or a grandmother watching kids for the summer. Most state POA statutes cap the delegation at six or twelve months but allow indefinite renewal, and critically, they require no vetting of the person receiving the authority. There is no fingerprinting, no criminal history check, no assessment of the home, and no judge. The document is signed, notarized, and the child is physically handed over — often across state lines, at a highway rest stop, a fast-food parking lot, or, in one documented case, a mobile home park.

Because a POA does not sever legal parental rights, the transfer flies beneath the radar of every safeguard that governs formal adoption. A licensed adoption — domestic or international — requires a home study, criminal and child-abuse registry checks, post-placement supervision, and a judge's finalization order. A foster placement requires a licensed, monitored home. Rehoming bypasses all of it precisely because, on paper, nothing "legal" has changed: the original adoptive parents remain the legal parents. In the eyes of the state, the child has simply gone to stay with a family friend. No agency is notified because no law requires notification. The child effectively vanishes from any official record — still legally belonging to parents who no longer have them, now living with adults no authority has ever screened.

Reuters investigative reporter Megan Twohey spent 18 months documenting this underground market for the 2013 series "The Child Exchange." She and her team scraped roughly 5,000 posts over five years from a single Yahoo bulletin board and built a database, finding that, on average, a child was advertised for private rehoming there about once a week. The children were overwhelmingly kids adopted internationally — from Russia, China, Ethiopia, Ukraine, Liberia, and elsewhere — most between the ages of 6 and 14, with the youngest just 10 months old. Many carried the diagnoses that drive adoptive families to the brink: reactive attachment disorder, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, PTSD, and the behavioral fallout of institutionalization and early trauma. The ads read like classified listings for used furniture: "Born in October of 2000 — this handsome boy, 'Rick,' was placed from India a year ago and is up for re-homing."

The Money: Subsidies That Follow the Child — or Don't

The financial architecture surrounding rehoming is where the outrage sharpens. Under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, the federal government reimburses states for adoption assistance subsidies paid to families who adopt children with "special needs" — a category that includes most older foster-care adoptees and many international adoptees with disabilities. These subsidies can run from a few hundred to well over a thousand dollars per child per month, plus Medicaid coverage, and federal Title IV-E adoption assistance is a multi-billion-dollar annual program (roughly $2.5–3 billion in federal outlays in recent years, matched by state dollars).

Here is the structural failure: the subsidy is tied to the adoption agreement, not to the child's physical whereabouts. When a family rehomes a child through a POA, the legal adoption is never dissolved — so in many cases the original adoptive parents keep cashing the monthly subsidy check for a child who no longer lives with them. There is no automatic trigger to alert the state, because the state was never told the child left. The parents who abandoned the child continue to be, in the government's ledger, the subsidized adoptive family in good standing.

Federal policy compounds the incentive from the other direction. Under HHS guidance, if an adoption dissolves entirely, a Title IV-E–eligible child retains that eligibility for a subsequent adoption — and, per the Administration for Children and Families, "the manner in which the child was removed from the adoptive home is irrelevant." The subsidy portability is designed compassionately, to make it easier to re-place a child. But paired with zero oversight of how a child is removed, it means the system is engineered to keep the money flowing while remaining deliberately incurious about whether a child was surrendered to a licensed agency or to a stranger in a parking lot. HHS's own Office of Inspector General has flagged Title IV-E adoption assistance payments as an area needing review for improper payments — but the reviews target accounting errors, not the physical safety or even the location of the children the checks are meant to support.

International adoption adds its own perverse economics. Adopting a child from abroad can cost families $30,000 to $50,000 in agency fees, travel, and legal costs. When the placement fails, families face those sunk costs plus the price of unwinding a foreign adoption through the courts — while a POA transfer costs essentially nothing. The system, in effect, prices desperate families directly toward the unregulated exit.

The Named Players and the Predators They Enabled

The most infamous figures the Reuters investigation surfaced were Nicole and Calvin Eason, an Illinois couple who trolled rehoming boards for children. When Wisconsin parents Todd and Melissa Puchalla decided to give up Quita, the 16-year-old they had adopted from Liberia and struggled to raise for two years, they found the Easons in less than two days through an online ad. On October 4, 2008, the Puchallas drove Quita to the Country Aire Mobile Home Park in Westville, Illinois, and handed her over — no lawyers, no social workers, no court. What the Puchallas did not know, and what no screening process existed to reveal, was that child-welfare authorities had already removed both of Nicole Eason's biological children; a sheriff's deputy who took away one infant reported the "parents have severe psychiatric problems as well with violent tendencies," and children the couple had previously babysat had accused them of sexual abuse. Quita later said she was sexually and physically abused in the Eason home.

The Easons were not an anomaly the market corrected; they were repeat operators the market kept feeding. Years later, federal prosecutors in the Central District of Illinois finally reached them — not under any anti-rehoming statute, because none existed federally, but under the kidnapping and interstate transportation-of-a-minor statutes. In 2007 the Easons had misrepresented their background to another set of parents — falsely claiming they had a home-study "waiver" — to induce them to transport a child across state lines, where the minor testified she was repeatedly sexually and physically abused over nearly a month. They did it again in 2008 with a second child. Calvin Eason pleaded guilty in November 2015; a federal jury convicted Nicole Eason on two counts of kidnapping and one count of transportation with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity with a minor, and the conviction was upheld by the Seventh Circuit in United States v. Eason (2017). It took roughly a decade, two more victimized children, and a creative use of kidnapping law to stop people the rehoming boards had let operate in plain sight.

The commercial gray zone matters too. Some licensed agencies built formal "second chance" or "disruption" programs — Wasatch International Adoptions in Ogden, Utah ran a "Second Chance" program before closing it and referring families to Nightlight Christian Adoptions' "Renewed Hope" program. These agency-run channels are the legitimate, screened alternative rehoming was supposed to route around, and their existence underscores the point: when families in crisis can't get, or can't afford, real re-placement services, they migrate to the free, unvetted online version. The predators simply wait where the desperate parents go.

What the Government Knows — and Refuses to Count

In 2015, after Congress asked, the Government Accountability Office produced GAO-15-733, "Child Welfare: Steps Have Been Taken to Address Unregulated Custody Transfers of Adopted Children." Its most telling finding was how little anyone could see: examining a single online forum over just 15 months, GAO identified 23 separate instances of a parent posting that they were seeking a new family for their child — and that was one board, one narrow window, only the posts investigators happened to catch. GAO concluded that unregulated transfers typically occur amid family crisis and a desperate inability to access services, "especially for intensive mental-health services for children from the foster care system who have significant exposure to trauma."

The data vacuum is the scandal within the scandal. HHS does not systematically collect data on adoption disruptions (failures before finalization) or dissolutions (failures after finalization), let alone on informal POA transfers that never touch an agency. The federal reporting that does exist is almost comically thin: for FY2010, states reported just 33 disruption/dissolution cases involving 41 internationally adopted children to HHS; for FY2011, only 6 Hague-Convention intercountry adoptions were logged as disrupted out of 9,320 completed. Those numbers are not measurements — they are the visible tip of an iceberg no one is required to survey. Peer-reviewed studies suggest adoption disruption rates of roughly 10% for children adopted after age 3 and as high as 24% for adolescents aged 12 to 17; child-welfare practitioners commonly estimate that 10–20% of older-child adoptions end in disruption or rehoming. But as advocates repeatedly note, "there is really no way of knowing the figures because rehoming is typically done without the involvement of any government entity or adoption agency." A child rehomed by POA generates no federal record, no state case file, and no statistic. They are, by design, uncountable.

The Accountability Gap: Everyone's Job, No One's Mandate

The rehoming problem persists because it falls into the seam between every agency that might catch it. The child-welfare system doesn't act because the child is legally still with their adoptive parents and no report is required. Adoption agencies lose all authority the moment finalization occurs — post-adoption, the family is a private household. Courts are never petitioned because a POA needs no judicial approval. Immigration authorities may have brought the child into the country but have no ongoing tracking role. And the notary who stamps the transfer document has, by law, exactly one duty: to verify that the signer is who they say they are. Not one link in the chain is charged with asking whether the adult receiving a child is safe.

Federally, the response has been to convene rather than to legislate. Agencies stood up an interagency working group on unregulated custody transfers in October 2013, in the immediate wake of the Reuters series. More than a decade later, there is still no federal criminal statute against rehoming itself. Prosecutors reaching bad actors must borrow kidnapping, trafficking, or sexual-abuse charges after harm has already occurred. A Florida judge, confronting a rehoming case, went so far as to call the practice trafficking outright — and legally, transferring custody of a child to a stranger who then exploits them fits squarely within the federal definition of human trafficking. Yet the transfer, absent proven exploitation, remains lawful in most of the country.

The states have moved, but slowly and unevenly. Wisconsin became the first state to act in 2013, making it illegal for anyone not state-licensed to advertise a child over age 1 for custody transfer. Louisiana, Colorado, Florida, and Arkansas followed with early laws restricting advertising or transfers. The Uniform Law Commission drafted the Uniform Unregulated Child Custody Transfer Act (UUCCTA) in 2021 to give states a model — defining an unregulated transfer as one made "without state agency or court oversight that assures the new custodian is safe and appropriate," requiring court involvement and vetting for permanent transfers, and criminalizing advertising and unvetted handoffs. Utah enacted it effective May 2022 (Title 78B, Chapter 24); Washington codified it at RCW 26.38; Colorado passed HB23-1157; South Carolina and North Carolina have considered versions. California's SB 1040 went further, making an unregulated custody transfer a criminal offense punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine, criminalizing the advertising of children for transfer, and ordering the state to convene a working group on services for internationally adopted children. Still, the coverage is a patchwork: as of 2025, only 17 states forbid unregulated custody transfers at all — meaning in a majority of states, the notarized handoff remains perfectly legal.

Why It Matters, and What Would Actually Fix It

The children caught in this gap are among the most vulnerable in the country: kids who survived orphanages, war, neglect, and trafficking abroad, only to be adopted, found "too difficult," and passed to strangers with less oversight than a rental-car transaction. Their trauma histories — the very conditions that overwhelm unprepared adoptive families — are also exactly what make them easy prey. Predators don't have to hunt; they answer ads. And because the rehomed child is legally invisible, abuse can continue undetected for years, in a home no caseworker knows exists, in the custody of an adult no one ever checked.

A serious fix is not mysterious; the components already exist in scattered form and could be assembled into coherent federal policy:

• Require court oversight and vetting for any permanent transfer of a child's custody — a home study, criminal and child-abuse registry checks, and a judge's finding of the child's best interest — as the UUCCTA prescribes, adopted nationally rather than in 17 states.
• Criminalize advertising children for custody transfer and executing unvetted permanent handoffs, closing the POA loophole while preserving legitimate short-term delegations for real emergencies.
• Mandate that HHS collect and publish national data on adoption disruptions and dissolutions, breaking the "we can't fix what we don't count" paralysis. AFCARS could be amended to require it.
• Tie subsidy continuation to the child's actual placement: require states to verify that a subsidized child still resides with the subsidized family, and to notify child welfare when a Title IV-E child changes households — ending the scenario where abandonment and a subsidy check coexist.
• Fund the post-adoption mental-health and respite services that GAO identified as the missing safety valve. Rehoming is very often a service-desert problem wearing a legal-loophole costume: families reach the underground market because the legitimate help they needed was unavailable, unaffordable, or nonexistent.

More than ten years after Reuters showed the nation that children were being handed to abusers through Yahoo groups, the fundamental facts remain: no federal law forbids the transfer, no federal agency counts the children, and in most states a parent can still give away an adopted child with a notary's stamp and a full tank of gas. The Easons went to prison. The system that delivered children to their door is, in most of America, still running.

Sources: - Reuters "The Child Exchange" (Megan Twohey) — via LAist and NPR, NBC News: Inside America's underground network for adopted children - Testimony of Megan Twohey, U.S. Senate HELP Committee (PDF) - GAO-15-733: Steps Taken to Address Unregulated Custody Transfers of Adopted Children and CWLA summary - DOJ: Illinois Couple (Easons) Sentenced for Kidnapping and Transporting a Minor and United States v. Nicole Eason, 7th Cir. (2017) - Wisconsin becomes first state to restrict rehoming (Fox News); ABA Journal: States start to crack down on 're-homing' - California SB 1040 / outlawing rehoming (Imprint News) - Uniform Unregulated Child Custody Transfer Act — Uniform Law Commission; Utah Code Title 78B Ch. 24 (Justia); Colorado HB23-1157; Washington RCW 26.38 - Title IV-E Adoption Assistance eligibility after dissolution (Families Rising) and ACF: Title IV-E Adoption Assistance; HHS OIG Work Plan: Title IV-E Adoption Assistance Payments - Wasatch "Second Chance" / Nightlight "Renewed Hope"; Families Rising: Rehoming and Illegal Transfers of Custody - Creating a Family: How Common Are Adoption Disruptions/Dissolutions; Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality: "Adopters' Remorse" (2025); Kentucky Lantern: A checklist for lawmakers (2026) - Psychology Today: Judge Says Rehoming Is Trafficking