A local government agency in rural Hunan, China abducts children from local families and then presumably sells them, reported Chinese newspaper Caixin.

In one documented case by Caixin, a child named Yang Ling was born in 2004. Her parents soon left to work in the cities, leaving the child with the grandparents.

Then, in May 2005, the child was “abducted by officials from the local family planning agency,” the grandparents said.

When confronted, the family planning agency fabricated a trove of documents, stating that Yang Ling’s parents found her, adopted her without authorization, and then requested that she be put up for adoption at the family planning agency due to economic difficulty.

Caixin reported that some of the fabricated documents didn’t even write the characters of the parents’ names correctly.

To this day, the whereabouts of Yang Ling is unknown to her parents, who are still searching for her.

Caixin reported that from 2002 to 2005, at least 20 infants have been abducted by the agency. These infants were then adopted by families “as far away as the U.S. and the Netherlands.”

Foreign child adoption is an expensive process in China; the fees alone cost thousands of US dollars. Presumably, the children were sold by the family planning agency to someone who can financially benefit from somewhere in the international adoption process.