South Korea’s truth commission has concluded that the government bears responsibility for facilitating a foreign adoption program rife with fraud and abuse, driven by efforts to reduce welfare costs and enabled by private agencies that often manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins.

South Korean adoption agencies sent children abroad like "luggage" for decades, labelling some as orphans when they had parents and sending alternative babies when infants had died before heading overseas,

The findings of a government probe confirm what many adoptees attested to for years: Babies were sent abroad for profit, often with falsified backstories.