Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I want to switch gears to just an unbelievable story
that I saw at the Wall Street Journal a couple
of days ago. The reporter's name is Khadija Softdar, and
the title of the article is the unraveling of a
charity's feel good story about saving African orphans.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
The whole story itself is long.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
It's in depth, it's almost literally unbelievable, and there is
a local hook in it talking about Lauren Ferrell, described
in the Wall Street Journal pieces as stay at home
mother living in Colorado who was trying to adopt a
child from Africa. And Lauren joins me in studio right
(00:40):
now to talk about this whole crazy story. So, first
of all, thanks for driving down. I appreciate it, thanks
for being here. So before we get into all the
craziness about what this quote unquote charity is or isn't,
why were you interested in adopting a child from Africa
in particular?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
We looked at a lot of international programs, and Malawi
sort of fit what we wanted in an international program
in terms of time and cost. And we had looked
domestically at all of our foster care and domestic adoptions,
but international fit us the best.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
So how did you come across this particular nonprofit called
Second Milk that appeared to be in the business of
trying to help people adopt orphans or unwanted children from MALLOWI.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, so, Malawi only has a few agencies that operate
doing international adoptions. So we looked at one of them,
which was Children of All Nations and they also go
by Great Wall of China. It's the same agency Great
Wall of China DBA Children of All Nations. We call
them CAN just for simplicity, and CAN had a foreign
service provider, which is basically the boots on the ground
(01:52):
in Malawi who's actually taking care of facilitating the adoptions,
finding the matches, and their foreign service was a nonprofit
called Second Milk, which is in this article as the
nonprofit you know in question. And Jason Karney, who's based
out of Arkansas, is the CEO and owner of Second Milk,
and so he was our foreign service provider for CAN.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
So what does foreign service provider mean?
Speaker 1 (02:18):
That like the liaison between the American adopting family and
the child or the country or the or the government
there or what.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Yeah, spot on.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
He still lives in Arkansas, but he would travel to
Malowi periodically and he would be the one facilitating point
A to point B on these adoptions.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
So really your boots on the ground.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
So let's just skip ahead a little bit.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
You're going through the process and you think you think
you're about to adopt a child from Malawi, and you
go over there in twenty twenty two, and then what happens.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
So I actually didn't travel when I was with CAN,
we weren't in the matching process yet, Okay, But what
happened is I started to have these red flags when
a gal named Nellya.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
Did to Malawi.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
She came back home after a really bad experience and
started talking about these sort of concerns publicly. Where I
came into the picture is that our adoption agency sent
an agency.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
Wide email that really, in my opinion.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Was like the first aha moment that they were gaslighting
this individual. They said, we had a family that traveled
to Malawi. They wanted to push their case along. They've
made up kind of these silicious rumors about Jason and
second Milk and all of this is unsubstantiated. She did
things that was disrespectful of social welfare, et cetera, et cetera.
When I read that email, all of my red flags
(03:37):
were going off, and I thought, you know what, I'm
just going to call her, yeah, and talk to her
myself and see if I can get some facts behind
me before we know if we want to proceed with
this agency or not.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Okay, So what'd you learn on that call?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
So when she talked to me about her experience, which
is in the article, but she basically was there to
visit two of her children that she was adopting non
biological siblings, and Jason had made up this story about
how she couldn't see one of her kids because she
had sent a photo book to the orphanage and they
found it offensive, and so it could it kind of
(04:13):
put a pause in her adoption process. She was awesome
to wait for Jason to return home, and she went
to the orphanage to visit and said, I'm so sorry
about the photo book and they said, what are you
talking about? And she said, well, you know, I'm here
to adopt this kiddo, and they said, you've never been
matched with this child.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
And so when she told.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Me some of these concerns, I said, hey, I have
a background kind of looking into some of this stuff.
Why don't you give me, you know, six to eight weeks.
Let me try to do some deep diving into the
documents and see what I can come up with and
see if there's any like substantive fact that then we
could bring to the agency if they're not finding you
credible right now.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So you were in an earlier part of the same
process with the same organizations as she I was.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
We had sent dossier which is basically a collection of
all of your documents that go to the government in
Malawi to say that you're suitable for adoption. And we
had sent that dossier to Malawi. And one of the
first things that clued me into there being a problem
is that the dossier that we shipped over we paid
(05:19):
the agency almost two hundred dollars to ship and at
the time, I thought, oh, that's just the standard, you know,
FedEx you to send a huge document abroad. And so
a few weeks had passed by and I hadn't heard
that my dossier arrived, and so I reached out to
Hannah Jones, who was the agency Malawi director, and she said, no,
your dossier hasn't arrived yet.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
It could take a while, and so I waited.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
A couple of weeks, and I'm like, Okay, now we're
surpassing five six weeks for this dossier to arrive. And
I checked in with her again and she goes, oh,
I'm so sorry, it just arrived today. I checked in
on it, so sorry that it had a delay. Well,
I open up my Instagram and Jason, who's the foreign
ser provider, had landed in Malawi that afternoon, and so
(06:03):
every red flag was going off, and I said, why
would they charge me for a label when I suspect
that they just sent my dossier with Jason to travel
with on his person.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Gosh.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
So I still don't know that for a fact, but
I've asked them several times for a tracking number so
that I could see, Hey, where did that dossier actually go?
Uh huh, And a couple months ago they said, you're
not going to get that tracking number unless you want
to get an attorney and go through your attorney. So
that was the first thing that clued me in, and
then there were mountains of documents that I pulled up
over a couple months after that kind of peeked my interest.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Okay, so now you've got a suspicion that everything's not
on the up and up. At that point, you haven't
necessarily proven and I don't know whether you have a
suspicion at this point just how fraudy this whole thing is,
Like is he just trying to steal a couple hundred
bucks or is the whole thing the Bernie made.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Off of adoptions? Right?
Speaker 1 (06:59):
So what in your mind at that moment, where was
your level of suspicion.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
On a scale of one to ten, I would say
it was about a three to four. At first, I
was like, maybe this is just really shoddy record keeping.
Maybe this is just something where you know, paperwork hasn't
been filed correctly, or there's not good communication. But as
I started pulling the documents that I had been trained
on how to pull, I started pulling nine ninety records
(07:25):
and seen in the nine to ninety records that from
twenty sixteen to twenty nineteen he reported zero dollars in
income for his salary for his nonprofit.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
And for folks who don't know, nine nineties are tax
filings required from nonprofits.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
So I started thinking, you know what, his Instagram lifestyle
is so lavish. He's taking these multi country vacations. For
his anniversaries. He's buying these you know, multi thousand dollars
writing lawnmowers and nice trucks, and his home is decorated
with the nicest furniture and he lives in this you know,
you know, five six hundred thousand dollars home in Arkansas.
And so I started diving into that and thinking, you know,
(08:03):
maybe his wife is funding this lifestyle. There's two partners
in this marriage. And I saw on the nine to
ninety records that she was a CFO for the nonprofit
and she was also reporting zero dollars in income.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
And that's where it.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Totally raised my suspicions from like that three to a
four to you know, an eight or a nine. And
so I started getting creative and calling church pastors of
his and calling former employees for the adoption agency, and
I started talking to the Secretary of State in Arkansas
to see that his businesses weren't even licensed at the
time in Arkansas. He had all these big names attached
(08:40):
to his nonprofit and so on the surface, it seems
so credible, but I wasn't buying it.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
I mean, was it like I don't mean the same name.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
But looking back on it now, do does it feel
like the way they got Tom Brady and a lot
of famous people to endorse FTX, which turned out to
be pretty fraudy. Maybe not as fraudy as this thing,
but is it like, you know, like you using famous
people to cover up what you're really doing.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
I do think so.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Notably, he had a close relationship with Ryan Thompson, the
MLB player, and close enough that when Ryan traveled with
him to Malowi. They even have a video posted where
Jason is baptizing Ryan in Malowi. So I would call
it this like very close personal circle with some of
these bigger names.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
And when I reached out to these folks.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Even after the affidavit came out. So for those of
you that don't know the affidavit from the Department of
State who's currently doing this investigation, the records are public online.
And so when I reached out to Ryan Thompson, for instance,
with this affidavit and sent it to him, his response
was still to me that, hey, you know, Jason's a
really close friend of mine. I still am supporting Second Milk.
(09:51):
I'm just trying to get some of the information. And
when I encouraged him to talk to the special investigator
over this case. I was denied on multiple occasions.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Talking with Lauren Farrell, who's stay at home mom and
adopting mom of a young son from Malawi, and you
have your biological daughter as well. And this whole story
in the Wall Street Journal called the unraveling of a
charity's feel good story about saving African orphans. It's just
(10:21):
an unbelievable thing. So now let's dive into the heart
of this. Okay, So now your suspicion levels are eight
or nine, and you apparently are the cause of some
significant investigation into this nonprofit by the State Department and
buy So where are things now? And is this guy
in jail? Is he going to jail? Do we know
(10:41):
that it's fraud? What do we know with them? And
that whole lifestyle thing, was he taking donations to this
charity and buying riding lawnmowers.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
So that's what this affidavit alleges is that when they
gained access to his financial records and these are publican affidavit,
he's spent hundreds and thousands of dollars on personal expenses.
They even determined that it met the threshold for so
many payments to be made fraudulently on behalf of their
personal mortgage that the US government put a lien on
(11:14):
his home, and those records are made public as well.
So we have this nonprofit that's bringing in, you know,
almost a million dollars, and from the records that they obtained,
it looks like the actual expenses for Second Milk were
about six grand a year.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
In terms of what they were spending on anything that
related to their claimed mission exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
So in Malawi, where they purported to be giving millions
of bottles of formula to these malnourished orphans, it doesn't
appear to be the case. In fact, some employees in
the affidavit stated that Jason would tell them that there
wasn't enough funding that month and they needed to remove
children from the program, and they actually had babies die
(11:58):
from being removed from the program.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Wow, And is he out there in the world raising
money at that time, saying, look at all the good
I'm doing, Write me a check.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Exactly In the Affidavid as well, there's one check that
is addressed, you know, God bless you in the memo
and it's addressed to Second Milk. And they were brazen
enough to deposit that second milk check in their personal
bank account. So there's this pattern of misuse of these
funds where all of these you know, Christian Americans are
(12:29):
donating mass amounts of money and they're expecting it to
go to actually feeding these impoverished orphans that are truly starving,
and instead it's going to fund the lifestyle of an
unscrupulous individual.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Right, and let me just highlight on this for a second,
because not only is all that you know, defrauding people
about helping children, but he took it to the next step,
as if he could be any more brazen. He had
a real Christian religious spin on this, right, I mean,
he's trying to sell himself not just as a helper,
(13:04):
but as a saint.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Absolutely, and even once the Wall Street Journal approached him,
you know, he went online the next day and posted
a Bible verse about you know, don't believe everything you hear.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4 (13:16):
So whether or not.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
He believes that he's actually doing good or if he's
just really tapped into the heart of what Christians want
to hear so that they keep donating, I'm uncertain.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
But it's been a wild.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Ride, unbelievable all right, So one more thing you mentioned
before we went on the air. There's some very large
adoption organization that because of you, the State Department started
looking at.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Can you tell that story?
Speaker 4 (13:41):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (13:42):
So.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
The agency Great Wall of China, doing business as Children
of All Nations. They've been around since the nineties. They're
one of the biggest adoption agencies in the United States. Coincidentally,
they also claim to be a Christian adoption agency, so
we've got a theme going on here.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
And they have done.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
So many adoptions, thousands and when I started bringing these
concerns to their attention, I was really gas lit. In fact,
the agency went as far as to help cover up
some of the documents that I was making public. And
I wrote this letter to the accrediting board called the
IAME and they do the accreditations for adoption agencies. When
(14:23):
I wrote this letter about my concerns, they sent it
along to the Department of State. So that's how it
got to the desk of the Department of State. And
so it's been about a two to three year process
of back and forth now, but in April of this
past year about April, CAN lost their accreditation, so they're
no longer able to do any adoptions, which for US
(14:45):
was a huge victory.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
They denied all wrongdoing, but their.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Case specifically, I think is going to be an ongoing
process as folks look into the allegations about them specifically.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
So they were decertified by the federal government for being
able to do any adoptions into the United States from anywhere.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
Correct.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Yeah, so they cannot do any international adoptions, and they
had enormous well, it's enormous, they've had multiple products.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
They started to interrupting. You've just got about a minute.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
What exactly did they do wrong that caused them to
lose their certification?
Speaker 3 (15:20):
I believe personally, in my opinion that the biggest claim
so far is that they were involved with knowing that
these children were not identified from social welfare and still
getting them into matches with these families to collect the
money from the matches. Wow, even though these children were
not deemed orphans by the government in Malawi.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
And there's a whole thing in the Wall Street Journal
article that I didn't get into, and I don't think
directly involved you, but it sounded like like these kind
of fraudy nonprofits took a kid, adopted a kid to
an American family when the kid's family didn't want to
taken if I reading the story.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Right, absolutely, and our fear is that we believe that
there's more children in the United States right now who
were adopted through this agency that are in a similar
situation and the parents likely have no idea that their
child was not a true orphan.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
All right, let's end on a happy note. Give us
twenty three seconds because I like prime numbers about you
being successfully adopting a child from Mallowy.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Just tell us a little Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
He's definitely our pride and joy. We said when we
adopted him we were going to keep whatever name he
was born with, and he was born with a name William,
and our last name's Ferrell.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
So we've got a little will Ferrell. We're like, you
know it. We're so proud of him.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
He's such a joy and it was a happy ending
to a really traumatic few years of our life.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
How old is he now?
Speaker 4 (16:48):
Two?
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Two? So? Is he a little terror? Is he running around?
And you got a child proof everything?
Speaker 4 (16:54):
And man, he's actually the most chill baby.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Really. Yes, Oh my gosh, lucky.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
You uh huh, totally opposite for my first born who
was just wild. So yeah, it's a good end to
the story. But man, we have to keep fighting against
these you know, people taking advantage of these kids that
have nothing.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Well, well I didn't ask you this before. You give
me a super fast answer.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
What was your How did you get the skill set
to do the investigative work that you did on this?
Speaker 3 (17:20):
Yeah? I worked for Weld County Human Services and at
one point I took over the investigative unit where we
had well for fraud investigators and so I had to
get up to speed in the training to be able
to supervise them.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
And kind of the rest is history.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah, they didn't.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
These fraudsters had no idea who they were messing with
once they started messing with you.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
But I mean, well done on.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
All your incredible detective work taking out like a really
bad guy who was not just stealing money but hurting
people and maybe even getting babies killed in Africa, And
just thank you very much for what you did, and
thanks for coming to tell us the story.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
I want to switch gears to just an unbelievable story
that I saw at the Wall Street Journal a couple
of days ago. The reporter's name is Khadija Softdar, and
the title of the article is the unraveling of a
charity's feel good story about saving African orphans.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
The whole story itself is long.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
It's in depth, it's almost literally unbelievable, and there is
a local hook in it talking about Lauren Ferrell, described
in the Wall Street Journal pieces as stay at home
mother living in Colorado who was trying to adopt a
child from Africa. And Lauren joins me in studio right
(00:40):
now to talk about this whole crazy story. So, first
of all, thanks for driving down. I appreciate it, thanks
for being here. So before we get into all the
craziness about what this quote unquote charity is or isn't,
why were you interested in adopting a child from Africa
in particular?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
We looked at a lot of international programs, and Malawi
sort of fit what we wanted in an international program
in terms of time and cost. And we had looked
domestically at all of our foster care and domestic adoptions,
but international fit us the best.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
So how did you come across this particular nonprofit called
Second Milk that appeared to be in the business of
trying to help people adopt orphans or unwanted children from MALLOWI.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, so, Malawi only has a few agencies that operate
doing international adoptions. So we looked at one of them,
which was Children of All Nations and they also go
by Great Wall of China. It's the same agency Great
Wall of China DBA Children of All Nations. We call
them CAN just for simplicity, and CAN had a foreign
service provider, which is basically the boots on the ground
(01:52):
in Malawi who's actually taking care of facilitating the adoptions,
finding the matches, and their foreign service was a nonprofit
called Second Milk, which is in this article as the
nonprofit you know in question. And Jason Karney, who's based
out of Arkansas, is the CEO and owner of Second Milk,
and so he was our foreign service provider for CAN.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
So what does foreign service provider mean?
Speaker 1 (02:18):
That like the liaison between the American adopting family and
the child or the country or the or the government
there or what.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Yeah, spot on.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
He still lives in Arkansas, but he would travel to
Malowi periodically and he would be the one facilitating point
A to point B on these adoptions.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
So really your boots on the ground.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
So let's just skip ahead a little bit.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
You're going through the process and you think you think
you're about to adopt a child from Malawi, and you
go over there in twenty twenty two, and then what happens.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
So I actually didn't travel when I was with CAN,
we weren't in the matching process yet, Okay, But what
happened is I started to have these red flags when
a gal named Nellya.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
Did to Malawi.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
She came back home after a really bad experience and
started talking about these sort of concerns publicly. Where I
came into the picture is that our adoption agency sent
an agency.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
Wide email that really, in my opinion.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Was like the first aha moment that they were gaslighting
this individual. They said, we had a family that traveled
to Malawi. They wanted to push their case along. They've
made up kind of these silicious rumors about Jason and
second Milk and all of this is unsubstantiated. She did
things that was disrespectful of social welfare, et cetera, et cetera.
When I read that email, all of my red flags
(03:37):
were going off, and I thought, you know what, I'm
just going to call her, yeah, and talk to her
myself and see if I can get some facts behind
me before we know if we want to proceed with
this agency or not.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Okay, So what'd you learn on that call?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
So when she talked to me about her experience, which
is in the article, but she basically was there to
visit two of her children that she was adopting non
biological siblings, and Jason had made up this story about
how she couldn't see one of her kids because she
had sent a photo book to the orphanage and they
found it offensive, and so it could it kind of
(04:13):
put a pause in her adoption process. She was awesome
to wait for Jason to return home, and she went
to the orphanage to visit and said, I'm so sorry
about the photo book and they said, what are you
talking about? And she said, well, you know, I'm here
to adopt this kiddo, and they said, you've never been
matched with this child.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
And so when she told.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Me some of these concerns, I said, hey, I have
a background kind of looking into some of this stuff.
Why don't you give me, you know, six to eight weeks.
Let me try to do some deep diving into the
documents and see what I can come up with and
see if there's any like substantive fact that then we
could bring to the agency if they're not finding you
credible right now.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So you were in an earlier part of the same
process with the same organizations as she I was.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
We had sent dossier which is basically a collection of
all of your documents that go to the government in
Malawi to say that you're suitable for adoption. And we
had sent that dossier to Malawi. And one of the
first things that clued me into there being a problem
is that the dossier that we shipped over we paid
(05:19):
the agency almost two hundred dollars to ship and at
the time, I thought, oh, that's just the standard, you know,
FedEx you to send a huge document abroad. And so
a few weeks had passed by and I hadn't heard
that my dossier arrived, and so I reached out to
Hannah Jones, who was the agency Malawi director, and she said, no,
your dossier hasn't arrived yet.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
It could take a while, and so I waited.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
A couple of weeks, and I'm like, Okay, now we're
surpassing five six weeks for this dossier to arrive. And
I checked in with her again and she goes, oh,
I'm so sorry, it just arrived today. I checked in
on it, so sorry that it had a delay. Well,
I open up my Instagram and Jason, who's the foreign
ser provider, had landed in Malawi that afternoon, and so
(06:03):
every red flag was going off, and I said, why
would they charge me for a label when I suspect
that they just sent my dossier with Jason to travel
with on his person.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Gosh.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
So I still don't know that for a fact, but
I've asked them several times for a tracking number so
that I could see, Hey, where did that dossier actually go?
Uh huh, And a couple months ago they said, you're
not going to get that tracking number unless you want
to get an attorney and go through your attorney. So
that was the first thing that clued me in, and
then there were mountains of documents that I pulled up
over a couple months after that kind of peeked my interest.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Okay, so now you've got a suspicion that everything's not
on the up and up. At that point, you haven't
necessarily proven and I don't know whether you have a
suspicion at this point just how fraudy this whole thing is,
Like is he just trying to steal a couple hundred
bucks or is the whole thing the Bernie made.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Off of adoptions? Right?
Speaker 1 (06:59):
So what in your mind at that moment, where was
your level of suspicion.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
On a scale of one to ten, I would say
it was about a three to four. At first, I
was like, maybe this is just really shoddy record keeping.
Maybe this is just something where you know, paperwork hasn't
been filed correctly, or there's not good communication. But as
I started pulling the documents that I had been trained
on how to pull, I started pulling nine ninety records
(07:25):
and seen in the nine to ninety records that from
twenty sixteen to twenty nineteen he reported zero dollars in
income for his salary for his nonprofit.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
And for folks who don't know, nine nineties are tax
filings required from nonprofits.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
So I started thinking, you know what, his Instagram lifestyle
is so lavish. He's taking these multi country vacations. For
his anniversaries. He's buying these you know, multi thousand dollars
writing lawnmowers and nice trucks, and his home is decorated
with the nicest furniture and he lives in this you know,
you know, five six hundred thousand dollars home in Arkansas.
And so I started diving into that and thinking, you know,
(08:03):
maybe his wife is funding this lifestyle. There's two partners
in this marriage. And I saw on the nine to
ninety records that she was a CFO for the nonprofit
and she was also reporting zero dollars in income.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
And that's where it.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Totally raised my suspicions from like that three to a
four to you know, an eight or a nine. And
so I started getting creative and calling church pastors of
his and calling former employees for the adoption agency, and
I started talking to the Secretary of State in Arkansas
to see that his businesses weren't even licensed at the
time in Arkansas. He had all these big names attached
(08:40):
to his nonprofit and so on the surface, it seems
so credible, but I wasn't buying it.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
I mean, was it like I don't mean the same name.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
But looking back on it now, do does it feel
like the way they got Tom Brady and a lot
of famous people to endorse FTX, which turned out to
be pretty fraudy. Maybe not as fraudy as this thing,
but is it like, you know, like you using famous
people to cover up what you're really doing.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
I do think so.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Notably, he had a close relationship with Ryan Thompson, the
MLB player, and close enough that when Ryan traveled with
him to Malowi. They even have a video posted where
Jason is baptizing Ryan in Malowi. So I would call
it this like very close personal circle with some of
these bigger names.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
And when I reached out to these folks.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Even after the affidavit came out. So for those of
you that don't know the affidavit from the Department of
State who's currently doing this investigation, the records are public online.
And so when I reached out to Ryan Thompson, for instance,
with this affidavit and sent it to him, his response
was still to me that, hey, you know, Jason's a
really close friend of mine. I still am supporting Second Milk.
(09:51):
I'm just trying to get some of the information. And
when I encouraged him to talk to the special investigator
over this case. I was denied on multiple occasions.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Talking with Lauren Farrell, who's stay at home mom and
adopting mom of a young son from Malawi, and you
have your biological daughter as well. And this whole story
in the Wall Street Journal called the unraveling of a
charity's feel good story about saving African orphans. It's just
(10:21):
an unbelievable thing. So now let's dive into the heart
of this. Okay, So now your suspicion levels are eight
or nine, and you apparently are the cause of some
significant investigation into this nonprofit by the State Department and
buy So where are things now? And is this guy
in jail? Is he going to jail? Do we know
(10:41):
that it's fraud? What do we know with them? And
that whole lifestyle thing, was he taking donations to this
charity and buying riding lawnmowers.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
So that's what this affidavit alleges is that when they
gained access to his financial records and these are publican affidavit,
he's spent hundreds and thousands of dollars on personal expenses.
They even determined that it met the threshold for so
many payments to be made fraudulently on behalf of their
personal mortgage that the US government put a lien on
(11:14):
his home, and those records are made public as well.
So we have this nonprofit that's bringing in, you know,
almost a million dollars, and from the records that they obtained,
it looks like the actual expenses for Second Milk were
about six grand a year.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
In terms of what they were spending on anything that
related to their claimed mission exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
So in Malawi, where they purported to be giving millions
of bottles of formula to these malnourished orphans, it doesn't
appear to be the case. In fact, some employees in
the affidavit stated that Jason would tell them that there
wasn't enough funding that month and they needed to remove
children from the program, and they actually had babies die
(11:58):
from being removed from the program.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Wow, And is he out there in the world raising
money at that time, saying, look at all the good
I'm doing, Write me a check.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Exactly In the Affidavid as well, there's one check that
is addressed, you know, God bless you in the memo
and it's addressed to Second Milk. And they were brazen
enough to deposit that second milk check in their personal
bank account. So there's this pattern of misuse of these
funds where all of these you know, Christian Americans are
(12:29):
donating mass amounts of money and they're expecting it to
go to actually feeding these impoverished orphans that are truly starving,
and instead it's going to fund the lifestyle of an
unscrupulous individual.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Right, and let me just highlight on this for a second,
because not only is all that you know, defrauding people
about helping children, but he took it to the next step,
as if he could be any more brazen. He had
a real Christian religious spin on this, right, I mean,
he's trying to sell himself not just as a helper,
(13:04):
but as a saint.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Absolutely, and even once the Wall Street Journal approached him,
you know, he went online the next day and posted
a Bible verse about you know, don't believe everything you hear.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4 (13:16):
So whether or not.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
He believes that he's actually doing good or if he's
just really tapped into the heart of what Christians want
to hear so that they keep donating, I'm uncertain.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
But it's been a wild.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Ride, unbelievable all right, So one more thing you mentioned
before we went on the air. There's some very large
adoption organization that because of you, the State Department started
looking at.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Can you tell that story?
Speaker 4 (13:41):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (13:42):
So.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
The agency Great Wall of China, doing business as Children
of All Nations. They've been around since the nineties. They're
one of the biggest adoption agencies in the United States. Coincidentally,
they also claim to be a Christian adoption agency, so
we've got a theme going on here.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
And they have done.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
So many adoptions, thousands and when I started bringing these
concerns to their attention, I was really gas lit. In fact,
the agency went as far as to help cover up
some of the documents that I was making public. And
I wrote this letter to the accrediting board called the
IAME and they do the accreditations for adoption agencies. When
(14:23):
I wrote this letter about my concerns, they sent it
along to the Department of State. So that's how it
got to the desk of the Department of State. And
so it's been about a two to three year process
of back and forth now, but in April of this
past year about April, CAN lost their accreditation, so they're
no longer able to do any adoptions, which for US
(14:45):
was a huge victory.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
They denied all wrongdoing, but their.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Case specifically, I think is going to be an ongoing
process as folks look into the allegations about them specifically.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
So they were decertified by the federal government for being
able to do any adoptions into the United States from anywhere.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
Correct.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Yeah, so they cannot do any international adoptions, and they
had enormous well, it's enormous, they've had multiple products.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
They started to interrupting. You've just got about a minute.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
What exactly did they do wrong that caused them to
lose their certification?
Speaker 3 (15:20):
I believe personally, in my opinion that the biggest claim
so far is that they were involved with knowing that
these children were not identified from social welfare and still
getting them into matches with these families to collect the
money from the matches. Wow, even though these children were
not deemed orphans by the government in Malawi.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
And there's a whole thing in the Wall Street Journal
article that I didn't get into, and I don't think
directly involved you, but it sounded like like these kind
of fraudy nonprofits took a kid, adopted a kid to
an American family when the kid's family didn't want to
taken if I reading the story.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Right, absolutely, and our fear is that we believe that
there's more children in the United States right now who
were adopted through this agency that are in a similar
situation and the parents likely have no idea that their
child was not a true orphan.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
All right, let's end on a happy note. Give us
twenty three seconds because I like prime numbers about you
being successfully adopting a child from Mallowy.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Just tell us a little Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
He's definitely our pride and joy. We said when we
adopted him we were going to keep whatever name he
was born with, and he was born with a name William,
and our last name's Ferrell.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
So we've got a little will Ferrell. We're like, you
know it. We're so proud of him.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
He's such a joy and it was a happy ending
to a really traumatic few years of our life.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
How old is he now?
Speaker 4 (16:48):
Two?
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Two? So? Is he a little terror? Is he running around?
And you got a child proof everything?
Speaker 4 (16:54):
And man, he's actually the most chill baby.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Really. Yes, Oh my gosh, lucky.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
You uh huh, totally opposite for my first born who
was just wild. So yeah, it's a good end to
the story. But man, we have to keep fighting against
these you know, people taking advantage of these kids that
have nothing.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Well, well I didn't ask you this before. You give
me a super fast answer.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
What was your How did you get the skill set
to do the investigative work that you did on this?
Speaker 3 (17:20):
Yeah? I worked for Weld County Human Services and at
one point I took over the investigative unit where we
had well for fraud investigators and so I had to
get up to speed in the training to be able
to supervise them.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
And kind of the rest is history.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah, they didn't.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
These fraudsters had no idea who they were messing with
once they started messing with you.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
But I mean, well done on.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
All your incredible detective work taking out like a really
bad guy who was not just stealing money but hurting
people and maybe even getting babies killed in Africa, And
just thank you very much for what you did, and
thanks for coming to tell us the story.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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