The FBI is investigating a prominent surrogacy agency that shuttered abruptly earlier this month, leaving desperate parents-to-be out of tens of thousands of dollars and surrogates missing payments as their pregnancies progressed.
The agency’s owner, Megan Hall-Greenberg, 49, effectively disappeared — she deleted her social media accounts, and clients and employees say she hasn’t replied to their messages since Dec. 3.
Last week, FBI agents descended on Hall-Greenberg’s home and the Camas, Washington, headquarters of Surro Connections, which was founded in 2010 and billed itself as a top-tier surrogacy agency with clients around the world.
A neighbor said he saw FBI agents escort someone from the home into a car but wasn’t sure of the person’s identity. Agents have also interviewed Surro Connections’ former employees, who abruptly lost access to their company email and records systems a day before it shut down.
One of them, Sarah Shaffer, was the agency’s marketing manager and lead surrogate coordinator. She estimates that some 150 families may have had money in the company’s in-house escrow system, totaling between $2 million and $5 million.
“Some intended parents had just funded a night before this happened,” Shaffer said, adding: “A lot of them have taken out savings to be able to afford this journey.”
In interviews, three intended parents and six current and former surrogates — two of whom are pregnant — described a sense of total shock after Surro Connections unexpectedly collapsed.
Mariana Klaveno, 46, had transferred more than $66,000 to the agency’s in-house escrow for an embryo transfer, which was planned for next month.
But then, her surrogate (also known as a gestational carrier) told her that something was wrong.
“‘Other surrogates aren’t getting paid. Everyone’s freaking out. Everyone says to get a lawyer,’” Klaveno recalled her saying. “And then come to find out that no one can get a hold of Megan … and none of the intended parents can access the supposed escrow account that we were assured was safe.”
An email came two days later: Surro Connections was “ceasing all operations” because of “financial and operational difficulties,” Hall-Greenberg wrote to intended parents Dec. 5. The company had “no liquid capital” to pay them back, the message said.
In a separate email, she told the agency’s staff that their employment was “terminated effective immediately.”
Hall-Greenberg did not respond to multiple requests for comment by phone and text message.
An FBI spokesperson said that per the bureau’s policy, “We cannot confirm or deny the existence of any specific investigation.”
Klaveno, who works as an actor in Los Angeles, had already been on a costly and emotionally draining 12-year infertility roller coaster. Now, the embryo transfer is on hold as she and her husband work to get their surrogacy process back on track.
Red flags
For families pursuing surrogacy, the process can be emotional and incredibly expensive. Intended parents often spend upward of $100,000, with large sums kept in escrow to compensate surrogates and cover their medical bills.
For all parties involved, the journey depends on trust. Klaveno said Hall-Greenberg had earned hers.
“Nobody arrives at surrogacy having had an easy go of it. Everybody comes here having had difficulties and losses,” she said. “I was able to call her cellphone when I had questions, and she was available — until suddenly she wasn’t.”
That personal connection made Hall-Greenberg’s recent actions especially hurtful, she added: “We weren’t just faceless names or numbers on a ledger. She knew us. She knew our stories.”
Shaffer, who counted Hall-Greenberg as a friend as well as a boss, said she feels dumbfounded and betrayed. “It was all about connection and building bonds and having this close-knit relationship with these intended parents and surrogates,” she said. “That’s what she preached.”
Surro Connections is not the first surrogacy-related firm to be rocked by a scandal: In the last three years, there have been at least four instances in which keepers of surrogacy-related escrow accounts stole funds from hopeful parents.
Most of those cases involved external escrow managers that held money for surrogacy agencies. Even so, the Society for Ethics in Egg Donation and Surrogacy, a nonprofit that releases standards for surrogacy and egg donation, still advises that a third party hold the escrow to protect intended parents and surrogates.
At Surro Connections, however, Hall-Greenberg used those scandals to persuade would-be parents to keep their escrow funds in-house, clients said.
She assured them that the funds were kept separate and housed at a bank insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., according to an email viewed by NBC News. Invoices and receipts were supposed to be loaded onto a shared folder that the intended parents could access. When parents or surrogates pushed back on the in-house system, Hall-Greenberg would often insist, multiple people said.
“In hindsight, it seems like it’s kind of a red flag that it was an in-house escrow situation, but they had sort of sold it as, ‘You get to save money with us,’” Klaveno said, given that the one-stop shop approach avoided some third-party fees.
There were other red flags, too.
Alexis Lytle, 27, a surrogate based in Indiana, said payments were sometimes late, prompting her to reach out to ask when they’d be deposited
“I just figured, ‘It’s an agency, they’re busy,’” said Lytle, who is 19 weeks pregnant.
She said her intended parents have assured her they’ll continue to support her, despite them losing about $40,000.
Public records suggest that Hall-Greenberg may have been experiencing financial strain.
Last year, she sold several cheerleading gyms that she had owned across Oregon and Washington. Between that business and Surro Connections, she owes Oregon more than $84,000 in unpaid taxes, according to the latest records from its Revenue Department.
Filings also show that Hall-Greenberg took out at least four loans over the past five years to support her businesses. In September, she sold a lender a percentage of Surro Connections’ future revenue for $15,000. The lender sued weeks later, accusing her of defaulting on the agreement, then discontinued the case in October for unspecified reasons.
The same month, a court ordered Hall-Greenberg to pay American Express over $70,000 that she owed in credit card debt. Less than six months prior, she had been ordered to pay the company more than $30,000.
‘It seemed unreal’
When payments to surrogates were late last month, Shaffer said, Hall-Greenberg told her it was an honest mistake — a result of extra work because an employee had been out of the office.
“I gave her the benefit of the doubt,” said Shaffer, who had worked for the agency for six years. From her perspective, business seemed good — she said she was offered a raise about a month ago.
After many payments didn’t go out as planned again in December, calls and complaints began to pour in, Shaffer said. But Hall-Greenberg asked Shaffer to clear her schedule, then stopped responding to employees and clients altogether. Christopher Foster, the owner of a neighboring business, said he heard the agency’s phone ringing off the hook for about 10 hours Dec. 5.
By the time the FBI searched the office, it appeared to have been cleared out, according to Foster, who was on site at the time.
“There were empty binders everywhere. Bags of shredded files … computers are 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 the problems at Surro Connections through a Facebook group. Stauffer is nine weeks pregnant.
She estimates her intended parents lost about $50,000.
“It seemed unreal. It seemed impossible that an agency could basically implode overnight with no notice,” Stauffer said.
Several former Surro Connections employees have been working to connect clients and surrogates to other agencies and organizations, which have in turn stepped up to help, with some offering pro bono services. But many intended parents are still struggling to process the scale of their losses and figure out how to move forward.
Klaveno doubts she’ll ever recoup her money, but worse is that Hall-Greenberg knew what that money represented, she said.
“It was the hope. It was the dream of building a family, and in some cases, maybe the only hope of doing that,” Klaveno said, “and she knew that.”