https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...says-known-better-responded-internet-ads.htmlA Virginia woman who faked being pregnant to dupe a California couple into thinking they were getting her baby has apologized for lying, but said they should have known better because there were 'red flags' that she had made it all up.
Elizabeth Jones, 34, told Matt Trayte, 40, and his 41-year-old wife Laura that they could adopt her baby girl after responding to their desperate internet pleas in September.
The Traytes had launched a search for pregnant women who were willing to put their babies up for adoption and Jones, a married mother-of-two from Virginia, responded to it.
Matt is a charter school English teacher. The pair met in college and after marrying in 2008, spent years enduring devastating miscarriages and brutal rounds of IVF to conceive their son, Hudson, in 2012.
Over the course of two months between September and November, Jones sent them photographs of fake ultrasounds, posed for photographs for their adoption announcement and even signed a Power of Attorney agreement giving them control of the nonexistent baby.
In November, Jones told the pair she was in labor, sent them photographs of a bloody blanket and even claimed she'd given birth in the back of an ambulance while they waited for her at the hospital she told them she was headed towards.
It was only when the couple asked staff at the hospital where she was that they learned she was not pregnant. They never gave her any money and it remains unclear why Jones concocted the elaborate hoax.
On Tuesday, she said she still did not know why she did it and was in therapy.
Though she apologized, she said the couple ought to have known better than to trust her unreservedly.
'I can't place all the blame on them no. I think there's, she said there was red flags,' she told ABC.
'I mean, if I had red flags I would want to check them out before I just jumped on a plane and met somebody.
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