How a top-tier surrogacy agency became an FBI target

The FBI is investigating a major surrogacy agency that closed its doors earlier this month, leaving desperate intended parents without tens of thousands of dollars and surrogates missing payments as their pregnancies progressed.

The agency’s owner, Megan Hall-Greenberg, 49, has effectively disappeared: She deleted her social media accounts, and clients and employees say she hasn’t responded to their messages since Dec. 3.

Last week, FBI agents visited Hall-Greenberg’s home and Camas, Washington, headquarters of Surro Connections, founded in 2010 and billing itself as a leading surrogacy agency with clients around the world.

A neighbor said he saw FBI agents escorting someone from the house to a car, but he was unsure of the person’s identity. Agents also interviewed former employees of Surro Connections, who abruptly lost access to their company’s email and recording systems a day before it closed.

One of them, Sarah Shaffer, was the agency’s marketing manager and main surrogacy coordinator. She estimates that about 150 families could have had money in the company’s internal deposit system, totaling between $2 million and $5 million.

“Some expectant parents had just financed a night before this happened,” Shaffer said, adding, “A lot of them took out savings to be able to afford this trip.”

In interviews, three intended parents and six current and former surrogates — two of whom are pregnant — described a feeling of complete shock after the unexpected collapse of Surro Connections.

Mariana Klaveno, 46, had transferred more than $66,000 to the agency’s internal deposit for an embryo transfer, scheduled for next month.

But then her surrogate (also known as a gestational carrier) told her something was wrong.

“‘The other surrogates don’t get paid. Everyone panics. Everyone says get a lawyer,'” Klaveno recalls. “And then find out that no one can get their hands on Megan…and none of the intended parents can access the so-called escrow account that we were assured was safe.”

An email arrived two days later: Surro Connections was “ceasing all operations” due to “financial and operational difficulties,” Hall-Greenberg wrote to the expectant parents on December 5. The company had “no liquid capital” to repay them, the message said.

In another email, she told agency staff that their employment had been “terminated with immediate effect.”

Hall-Greenberg did not respond to multiple requests for comment by phone and text message.

An FBI spokesperson said that, in accordance with bureau policy, “we cannot confirm or deny the existence of a specific investigation.”

Klaveno, who works as an actor in Los Angeles, had already endured a 12-year roller coaster of costly and emotionally draining infertility. Today, the embryo transfer is on hold as she and her husband work to get their surrogacy process back on track.

Red flags

For families looking to pursue surrogacy, the process can be emotional and incredibly expensive. Intended parents often spend more than $100,000, with significant sums kept to compensate surrogates and cover their medical costs.

For all parties involved, the journey depends on trust. Klaveno said Hall-Greenberg earned hers.

“No one comes to surrogacy having had an easy experience. Everyone comes here with hardship and loss,” she said. “I was able to call her on her cell phone when I had questions, and she was available – until, suddenly, she wasn’t. »

That personal connection made Hall-Greenberg’s recent actions particularly hurtful, she added: “We weren’t just faceless names or numbers on a ledger. She knew us. She knew our stories.”

Shaffer, who considered Hall-Greenberg a friend and a boss, said she felt stunned and betrayed. “It was all about connecting, building relationships and maintaining close relationships with these intended parents and surrogates,” she said. “That’s what she preached.”

Surro Connections is not the first surrogacy-related company to be rocked by scandal: Over the past three years, there have been at least four cases in which surrogacy-related escrow account holders stole funds from hopeful parents.

Most of these cases involved external escrow managers who held money for surrogacy agencies. Despite this, the Society for Ethics in Egg Donation and Surrogacy, a nonprofit organization that issues standards for surrogacy and egg donation, still advises that a third party hold escrow to protect intended parents and surrogates.

At Surro Connections, however, Hall-Greenberg used those scandals to persuade expectant parents to keep their funds tied up in-house, clients said.

She assured them that the funds were kept separately and housed in a bank insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., according to an email viewed by NBC News. Invoices and receipts were supposed to be uploaded to a shared folder that expectant parents could access. When parents or surrogates objected to the internal system, Hall-Greenberg often insisted, several people said.

“Looking back, it seems like that was kind of a red flag that it was an internal filing situation, but they had kind of sold it as, ‘You can save money with us,’” Klaveno said, since the one-stop-shop approach avoided some third-party fees.

There were other warning signs, too.

Alexis Lytle, 27, a surrogate based in Indiana, said the payments were sometimes late, prompting her to ask when they would be deposited.

“I just thought, ‘It’s an agency, they’re busy,'” said Lytle, who was 19 weeks pregnant.

She said her future parents assured her they would continue to support her, even though they lost about $40,000.

Public records suggest Hall-Greenberg may have experienced financial difficulties.

Last year, she sold several cheerleading gyms she owned in Oregon and Washington. Between that company and Surro Connections, it owes Oregon more than $84,000 in unpaid taxes, according to its revenue department’s latest records.

Records also show that Hall-Greenberg took out at least four loans over the past five years to support his businesses. In September, she sold a percentage of Surro Connections’ future revenue to a lender for $15,000. The lender filed a lawsuit a few weeks later, accusing it of breaching the agreement, then dropped the case in October for unspecified reasons.

That same month, a court ordered Hall-Greenberg to pay American Express more than $70,000 she owed in credit card debts. Less than six months earlier, she was ordered to pay more than $30,000 to the company.

“It seemed unreal”

When payments to surrogates were late last month, Shaffer said, Hall-Greenberg told him it was an honest mistake — the result of extra work due to an employee being out of the office.

“I gave him the benefit of the doubt,” said Shaffer, who had been with the agency for six years. From her perspective, business looked good: She said she was offered a raise about a month ago.

After numerous payments weren’t made as expected in December, calls and complaints began pouring in, Shaffer said. But Hall-Greenberg asked Shaffer to clear his schedule, then stopped responding to employees and customers altogether. Christopher Foster, owner of a nearby business, said he heard the agency’s phone ringing for about 10 hours on Dec. 5.

By the time the FBI searched the office, it appeared to have been emptied, according to Foster, who was there at the time.

“There were empty filing cabinets everywhere. Bags of shredded files…the computers were all gone,” he said.

Kama Stauffer, 34, a first-time surrogate from Ashland, Ohio, said she received her payment this month but found out about Surro Connections’ problems through a Facebook group. Stauffer is nine weeks pregnant.

She estimates her future parents lost about $50,000.

“It seemed unreal. It seemed impossible that an agency could implode overnight, without notice,” Stauffer said.

Several former Surro Connections employees worked to connect clients and surrogates with other agencies and organizations, who in turn stepped up to help, some offering pro bono services. But many intended parents still struggle to understand the magnitude of their losses and figure out how to move forward.

Klaveno doubts she will ever get her money back, but the worst part is that Hall-Greenberg knew what the money represented, she said.

“It was the hope. It was the dream of starting a family, and in some cases, maybe the only hope of achieving that,” Klaveno said, “and she knew it.”