Who Is Tara Lee? The Mom of 5 Ran an Adoption Scam That Left Couples Heartbroken

A mom of five stole millions of dollars from over a hundred couples seeking to adopt and spent the money on designer handbags, jewelry and travel in an elaborate nationwide adoption scheme that left hopeful families childless.

Tara Lynn Lee of New Haven, Mich., was indicted on 23 counts of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft. However, as part of her plea agreement in August 2019, she pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud, according to prosecutors.

She was sentenced to 10 years in an Alabama federal prison but transferred to a Detroit halfway house in 2025. The convicted swindler was also ordered to pay upwards of $1 million in restitution.

According to the Bureau of Prisons, Lee is scheduled for release in October 2026.

Lee is a Michigan native—the eldest of five siblings, according to The New Yorker. After high school graduation in 1999, she moved to Florida to work at Disney World. Lee went on to marry her high school sweetheart, and they have five kids together: three biological and two adopted, per the magazine.

Lee split her time between Florida and Michigan, and in 2015, she registered her business, the Always Hope Pregnancy and Education Center in Jacksonville, Fla., where she helped pregnant women find adoptive families. But Michigan authorities discovered Lee was mostly conducting operations in their state, where she was unlicensed, The New Yorker reported.

At first, Lee alleged to state investigators that she was only driving expectant mothers to their doctors’ appointments and organizing clothing donations, but complaints against her business continued, and she was ordered to get licensed in Michigan. Despite this, she never complied and carried on with her illegal operations, according to the magazine.

Lee pretended to be a licensed social worker from a legitimate agency and targeted couples seeking to grow their families between 2014 and 2018. According to the superseding indictment, she would match birth mothers and adoptive parents by first sending a description of a pregnant woman to her network of adoption connections. Families would respond with information about themselves. Lee would then tell parents that the birth mother chose them and proceed to collect a down payment.

Down payments ranged from $10,000 to $33,000, the Detroit Free Press reported, citing the criminal complaint. Lee collected more money from families throughout the process that she claimed would cover fees and birth mother expenses.

“Lee literally stole the dreams of people who wanted to become moms and dads,” U.S. Attorney Matthew Schneider said in a statement, according to Macomb Daily. “And she used the profits from those stolen dreams to buy high-end jewelry and luxuries for herself. Such a twisted and sick deceit of these innocent victims deserves this appropriate sentence in federal prison.”

As part of her plea agreement, Lee admitted to matching up adoptive parents with phony birth moms, women who were not pregnant or women who had no interest in putting their child up for adoption, per court records. The FBI said in one case, Lee lied to an adoptive couple that their child’s birth mother was shot to death and that the baby did not survive, per the indictment. She then went on to ask for funeral donations, the Free Press reported.

Furthermore, Lee sometimes “double matched” families by pairing more than one set of adoptive parents to the same birth mother and collecting payments from both sets of adoptive parents, the indictment read. Lee and her co-conspirator, Enhelica Wiggins, also impersonated birth mothers during phone calls with adoptive parents, according to authorities.

The scheming came to an end in 2018 when authorities were tipped off by a suspicious adoptive mother, Julie Faulkenberry, who said Lee told her the baby she planned to adopt died minutes after birth, per The New Yorker. Lee reportedly promised to send Faulkenberry photos and the baby’s birth and death certificates, but they never came through, and the victim contacted the FBI and the attorneys that worked with Lee—who were responsible for drawing up adoption papers, the magazine reported.

“You’re scamming people,” Faulkenberry reportedly told the lawyers. “How can you sleep at night?”

The attorneys claimed they were unaware of Lee’s swindling, and after doing their own research, they too reached out to federal authorities.

“These people that have been affected by this, it’s not just another baby, not just money,” one victim, John Crouch, told WXYZ. “There was hope there for those people, and it was completely ripped away from them.”

One woman confessed she got duped out of thousands of dollars—twice.

“The trauma is still very real,” Cortney Edmond told the station in a separate interview. “We had two fails with [Lee]; we met both of the babies. We were there for the birth. To have a failed adoption is one thing, but to also have those babies in your arms and name them and love them, just to have them taken away again, that’s traumatic. It’s like a death for me.”

At Lee’s sentencing in 2020, another victim admitted to the court that she still had an "empty nursery that I cannot bring myself to take down,” according to The Detroit News.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Woodward wrote in a sentencing memo that Lee’s duplicity “broke her victims’ hearts, over and over again” and sometimes “stole her victims’ ability to become parents.” “It is impossible to quantify the emotional and psychological pain that she caused to countless families,” she stated, the paper reported.

Lee’s defense attorney Paul Stablein said that his client was a “hard-working and dedicated member of society for most of her life.”

“Her involvement in this case appears to be an aberration from what, by all accounts, was a sincere desire to help women and children who were in need,” he said, according to Macomb Daily.

For her part, Wiggins subsequently pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and was sentenced to 21 months in prison in 2020, WZZM-TV reported.