Loading summary
Transcript94 lines
- [00:06]
Ryan Knudsen
This may be a difficult thing to articulate, but why did you want to have kids so badly?
- [00:13]
Anna Maria Galozzi
Do you ever feel like there is more of yourself to give, more to love, more to explain? And there's just this constant want and need to give more? I have felt that since I met my husband.
- [00:40]
Ryan Knudsen
When Anna Maria Galozzi met her husband, she says the topic of kids came up immediately.
- [00:46]
Anna Maria Galozzi
On our very first date, we went to a Capitals hockey game, and our first conversation after the hockey game was, so, do you want kids? So we knew immediately, like, where we laid with kids, what we thought we wanted to parent, like, how we wanted to raise them, what religion. Like, all of that we kind of fleshed out on our first date.
- [01:06]
Ryan Knudsen
How many kids did you and your husband think you wanted?
- [01:11]
Anna Maria Galozzi
So he has always been like, the Perfect family is 2.5 kids. I'm like, what is a 0.5 kid? Like, what is that, a dog? Like, what is a 0.5 kid? And I'm Italian Catholic. I wanted as many kids as my body would give me. Really, I was ready to go the distance.
- [01:26]
Ryan Knudsen
7, 8. Let's go for it.
- [01:28]
Anna Maria Galozzi
Yeah, let's have a full hockey team. Like, let's go.
- [01:38]
Ryan Knudsen
Unfortunately for Anna Maria, her dream of building a big family would prove much harder than she anticipated. In order to have kids at all, she'd need help from a multi billion dollar fertility industry. But that industry is almost entirely unregulated. And as recent legal battles and an investigation by the Wall Street Journal show, parts of the industry can also be plagued with fraud.
- [02:09]
Ben Foldy
No one is above being a victim of a financial crime. Like, it's not that anybody made a mistake here. Like, I don't know what they could have done differently.
- [02:21]
Anna Maria Galozzi
What we thought of is we would have a baby or we wouldn't have a baby. You never once think, okay, now that I've made it through all these millions of hurdles, is there money going to be there tomorrow?
- [02:40]
Ryan Knudsen
Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business, and power.
- [02:44]
Ben Foldy
Ryan Power.
- [02:45]
Ryan Knudsen
I'm Ryan knudsen. It's Friday, March 13th. Coming up on the show, our deep dive into the fertility industry continues. Today. They wanted a baby. Then their money went missing.
- [03:17]
Sponsor Voice
This episode of the Journal is presented by Intuit Enterprise Suite. If your finance team spends more time finding data than using it. If there's one entity here and one here and one here and one here. If scaling your business feels like starting over, you need the Intuit ERP. Intuit Enterprise Suite. The AI native ERP is here from the makers of QuickBooks learn more@intuit.com
- [03:45]
this episode is brought to you by Alexa. Say hello to Alexa and see how Alexa can do more for you. Need tickets to that last minute show? Craving your favorite restaurant? Sit back, relax and talk naturally. Alexa's on it. Alexa learns your preferences to create a personalized experience. And now Alexa is free with prime on your Amazon devices like echo and Fire TV. Learn more at Amazon.com Alexaplus.
- [04:22]
Ryan Knudsen
Anna Maria and her husband got married in 2017. And two years later, around the same time that they were trying to build a family, Anna Maria noticed something. A growing pain in her shoulder and chest.
- [04:34]
Anna Maria Galozzi
In October of 2019, I found a dime sized lump in my breast that in two weeks that turned into a golf sized ball. I was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. Hearing that you have breast cancer, you immediately go to the worst, right?
- [04:58]
Ryan Knudsen
Well, yeah. I mean, stage four, that's pretty serious.
- [05:00]
Anna Maria Galozzi
Yeah, it's normally a death sentence. And now for the rest of my life, I go into the infusion room and I get a chemo every three weeks.
- [05:08]
Ryan Knudsen
Wow. You're gonna do chemo every three weeks for the rest of your life?
- [05:12]
Anna Maria Galozzi
The rest of my life.
- [05:14]
Ryan Knudsen
The type of cancer that Anna Maria has can get worse if there's a surge of hormones like there is during a pregnancy.
- [05:22]
Anna Maria Galozzi
My cancer being hormone receptive immediately stripped me of the ability to carry my own child.
- [05:30]
Ryan Knudsen
What went through your mind when you heard that?
- [05:34]
Anna Maria Galozzi
That I failed my husband, who also desperately wanted to be a dad. That I failed my family. That I failed myself. Of a dream that I'll never get to achieve. Because not only did I want a child, I wanted to be pregnant. Now I had to grieve this ability to bring a life into the world in a traditional way.
- [06:01]
Ryan Knudsen
Hope wasn't all lost. Anna Maria and her husband could do IVF and have a baby via a surrogate. However, going down this road wasn't an easy decision because of Anna Maria's faith.
- [06:14]
Anna Maria Galozzi
I'm an Italian Catholic from New York. Like I knew the Catholic stance was anti ivf, anti surrogacy. So I had to grapple with this belief system, change so much. So I went and sat down with my priest and I kind of asked him, just like I know the church is against this, what do I do? Father Chuck looked at me and he just goes, you have to do whatever brings the most love into the world. And it was the most sound advice I've ever gotten. That following Wednesday, I had my first IVF meeting with a fertility specialist.
- [07:05]
Ryan Knudsen
Anna Marie and her husband did One round of ivf, where they surgically extracted her eggs and combined them with her husband's sperm to make five embryos, which, if you've gone through IVF before, you know is a pretty good start. The next step was finding a surrogate. To do that, they signed up with a surrogacy agency.
- [07:26]
Anna Maria Galozzi
So we interviewed surrogacy agencies, fell in love with a boutique agency that's here in Texas, here in Austin, and sent them our profile, did all the things. Within days of us being on their profiles for gestational carriers, we were matched.
- [07:46]
Ryan Knudsen
In mid-2020, a surrogate was implanted with Anna Maria's first embryo. The transfer was successful, but ultimately ended in a miscarriage. Anna Maria and her husband were heartbroken, but decided to keep going.
- [08:02]
Anna Maria Galozzi
And then In October of 2020, we did an embryo transfer that ended us with Michael.
- [08:10]
Ryan Knudsen
It worked. Despite some complications. Anna Maria and her husband eventually had a healthy baby boy with a head full of blonde hair. Michael was named after Anna Maria's dad, who had recently died and whose inheritance had helped pay for the whole thing. And how much money did you spend on that surrogacy?
- [08:35]
Anna Maria Galozzi
About $90,000.
- [08:38]
Ryan Knudsen
Was that all of the inheritance?
- [08:39]
Anna Maria Galozzi
All of it. But I got Michael, who's my dad's namesake now, so it feels like it was worth it. Yeah, feels right.
- [08:48]
Ryan Knudsen
It had been difficult and expensive to get there, but Anna Maria and her husband finally had a child, and they didn't want to stop there. They still had three embryos left for their next attempt. They went with the same surrogacy agency as before, this time taking a second mortgage out on their house to cover. Cover the cost. Then their third embryo was implanted into a surrogate.
- [09:17]
Anna Maria Galozzi
We got through the transfer. We ended up having a miscarriage. And I was so depressed, so devastated. It was. It was incredibly hard. Our chances were dwindling to have another
- [09:41]
Ryan Knudsen
child, But there was still a chance. So they and their surrogate geared up to implant another embryo, one of the two they had left. That's when Anna Maria got a phone call that changed everything.
- [10:00]
Anna Maria Galozzi
Two weeks after the miscarriage, we get a call from our agency that our surrogate wasn't being paid, that they can't get a hold of anyone who knows what's going on. I remember we were leaving my son's well, check appointment when we got that phone call from the agency. And I looked at my husband, and he just goes, our money's gone. And I was like, no, there's got to be a mistake. Like, we're fine. There's got to be a mistake. There was absolutely no mistake. Our money was gone.
- [10:44]
Ryan Knudsen
What happened to the money is after the break.
- [10:54]
Sponsor Voice
Say you've always wanted to sneak away for a last minute long weekend in Napa. Here's the thing. If you get smart with your money, you could do things like that. With Empower, you can start making the most out of your money so you can go out and live a little. Isn't that why we work so hard to have some fun with our money? Like treating yourself to a private wellness retreat or scoring incredible seeds to a concert you'll never forget? So use Empower and get good at money so you can be a little bad. Join their 19 million customers today at empower.com, not an Empower client, paid or sponsored.
- [11:25]
This episode is brought to you by Verizon. Good news. Frontier is joining Verizon. That's right. America's best mobile network and Frontier's lightning fast fiber Internet are coming together. And for a limited time, get Verizon's best offer ever. When you bundle your plans, Frontier and Verizon better together. Based on RootMetric's best overall mobile network performance. US second half 2025. All rights reserved. Your results may vary. Service availability varies. Terms apply.
- [12:01]
Ryan Knudsen
Our colleague Ben Foldy is on the Wall Street Journal's investigations team, and he's been digging into the financial side of the booming surrogacy industry.
- [12:09]
Ben Foldy
It's not something I'd really thought about before. It's not usually something we talk about at the Journal. And then as I kind of dug into understanding it, I just got fascinated by this market.
- [12:20]
Ryan Knudsen
What was so fascinating to you about it?
- [12:22]
Ben Foldy
That it's a market. And like, I think that makes people uncomfortable. You know, it lends itself to like, what. What does a market for human life mean? And what should it mean? And, you know, people would be like, well, you. You're calling it an industry. It's like, well, yeah, at the Wall Street Journal, industry is not a dirty word. Like, I'm not. It's not. It's not pejorative to call something an
- [12:46]
Ryan Knudsen
that are in the surrogacy world.
- [12:47]
Ben Foldy
Sort of felt like, yeah, because I think there's a strong discourse of it's super emotional. Right? There's nothing more emotional and neurotic and jarring than parenting. Right? And now you're putting that in a contractual relationship altogether.
- [13:03]
Ryan Knudsen
A surrogate birth can end up costing more than $150,000. And assigning dollars and cents to every step of the process can be awkward. Then there's the matter of actually paying the surrogate. Intended parents typically don't want to pay everything up front before they get a baby. And surrogates want some assurance that they're going to get paid before they carry someone else's kid. The industry's solution to this problem is a common financial instrument known as an escrow account.
- [13:35]
Ben Foldy
I think most people. Most people's experience with escrow will be a house, right? Like the sale transaction of a house with a house.
- [13:45]
Ryan Knudsen
Buyers put their down payment into an escrow account, which is controlled by a third party. Once a transaction is closed, the money is released to the seller, and both parties go their separate ways. With fertility escrows, though, things are more complicated, and these escrow companies play a much more active role.
- [14:04]
Ben Foldy
The escrow provider is not only dealing with releasing money to the surrogate, but they're also dealing with making payments to the insurance companies and the doctors and the agencies and, you know, any fees that come up, you know, let's say your surrogate needs to go on bed rest and can't work anymore. And then so the contract provides for that money. And then so the escrow agent is not only releasing the funds, but evaluating the contract between both parties to be like, okay, this. This condition has been met. This money can be released. So it's almost like kind of like a administrative payment processor, as much as it is in escrow.
- [14:44]
Ryan Knudsen
Did you even think about escrow, like, or was it just sort of among the checklist of items from the surrogacy agency?
- [14:53]
Anna Maria Galozzi
It was just among the checklist items. I'll be honest with you. I was just excited at the possibility of having a kid. An agency who I vetted, I trusted, I did my full background on, told me this is a requirement. Great, let's go.
- [15:09]
Ryan Knudsen
Anamaria used an escrow company called Seam, which stands for Surrogacy Escrow Account Management. At the time, Seam was one of the biggest companies in the space with hundreds of clients. And Anna Maria had a good experience with the company during her first surrogacy, especially when things got complicated with the surrogate.
- [15:27]
Anna Maria Galozzi
They were phenomenal.
- [15:29]
Ryan Knudsen
When you say they were phenomenal, what do you mean?
- [15:31]
Anna Maria Galozzi
In our journey, there were points where our surrogate was asking for more money or at different intervals. And SEEM actually came in and was like, nope, that's not in the contract. Nope, you're at your limit already. Or would call me and be like, hey, do you want to approve this or deny this? They were heavily involved. I trusted them. They were another Part of my team, it felt like.
- [15:54]
Ryan Knudsen
But Ben would learn that there were things going on behind the scenes at the escrow company. In 2024, Ben got a tip from a family that used seam. They told him that the company had lost all their money and they weren't the only ones. So Ben started digging into seam.
- [16:15]
Ben Foldy
So seam it was run by a woman named Dominic Seid, who was herself a surrogate and like she was kind of well respected in the industry, you know, was speaking on panels at industry conventions and things like that. But Dominic's side also had kind of a other interests. Let's say you have built a boutique
- [16:40]
Anna Maria Galozzi
vegan grocery store, founded a luxury vegan clothing line and you are the co owner of the Vegan Bay Music Group.
- [16:47]
Ryan Knudsen
That's a host introducing Dominique's side on a podcast. Inside's response.
- [16:52]
Anna Maria Galozzi
It's honestly sometimes a good reminder because when you're in it, like doing all the things you don't really get. Really? Like I do all these things? Yes.
- [17:05]
Ben Foldy
You know, she had a rap career. She had a fashion line, like a vegan fashion line. She had these other businesses and spend that she was not really shy about.
- [17:21]
Ryan Knudsen
These other businesses didn't seem like a big deal. But after some of their escrow payouts were delayed, seem clients alleged that side was funding her businesses with their money, money that they'd put aside to have children.
- [17:35]
Ben Foldy
What everybody figured out pretty quickly once they learned that the money was gone was that all of those other assets, the recording studio, almost an entire subdivision worth of land that wasn't developed yet. Like, almost all of that money came from parents putting their money into seam for escrow
- [17:59]
Ryan Knudsen
parents like Anna Maria. Anna Maria had seen Dominique's side social media, which she says depicted a pretty lavish lifestyle. But she didn't think much of it until she got that phone call at her son's well check appointment and learned that the $50,000 she'd cobbled together to try and expand her family was gone. How are you feeling amid all this?
- [18:24]
Anna Maria Galozzi
I'm angry. I'm beyond angry. I'm upset. We never once thought that we could put our money in a trusted escrow and then have it be gone. No, I put it in escrow. It's supposed to be safe, it's secure. This is supposed to be scam free.
- [18:45]
Ryan Knudsen
Do you think you'll ever get any of the money back?
- [18:49]
Anna Maria Galozzi
No, that's gone. It's long gone. Yeah, it was probably used for a yacht experience.
- [18:58]
Ryan Knudsen
In total, according to court documents, more than 600 families lost about six $16 million through escrow accounts managed by Seam. Dominique's side didn't respond to our requests for comment. Ben reviewed documents showing Seam was in major financial trouble. It owed thousands of dollars in property taxes. It had lenders going after it for $1.2 million in unpaid debts. As more families discovered their money was gone, the scandal became public.
- [19:32]
Sponsor Voice
In court filings, Dominic Syed is accused of using hundreds of her clients money in a fraudulent way to fund a lavish lifestyle.
- [19:40]
As a.
- [19:41]
Ryan Knudsen
Around three dozen families ended up suing Seam in Texas state court, the family's alleged breaches of contract and fraud and sought to recover more than $1.7 million they had on deposit at Seam.
- [19:52]
Sponsor Voice
They say Dominique side used that cash
- [19:55]
Anna Maria Galozzi
for global travel, luxury expenses, and designer
- [19:59]
Sponsor Voice
clothes she showed off at big events. Side is accused of using the money to create her own music videos as she launched her music career as a rap and RB singer for trips all over the world.
- [20:14]
Ryan Knudsen
Ana Maria decided not to join the lawsuit, partly because she worried it would limit her ability to talk publicly about what happened.
- [20:22]
Ben Foldy
Foreign
- [20:26]
Ryan Knudsen
Dominique's side never appeared in court, but a judge ruled that she owed the families in the lawsuit over a million dollars in damages she hasn't paid. In an email, the plaintiff's attorney declined to comment. The FBI office in Houston also opened an investigation into Seam.
- [20:45]
Ben Foldy
One of the things that stood out to me was how escrow is such a boring word and concept that this seemed like the lowest risk part of the whole process. Like, you're like, oh, I got to worry about whether or not this embryo is going to take. And I got to worry about a delivery. And I got to worry about, you know, can I trust the person who I'm putting the embryo in? And you have to, you know, there's so much. There's so many stressors, and it's like, oh, well, the person just has to hold on to the money and disperse it according to a contract. Like, that's the easiest part of this. Like, why would I worry about that part?
- [21:16]
Ryan Knudsen
Yeah. With all the rules that exist around the financial industry, it makes me wonder how this is even possible.
- [21:22]
Ben Foldy
There just isn't regulation. Like, it's a completely. A nearly completely unregulated market.
- [21:29]
Ryan Knudsen
Ben says that practically anyone could set up their own surrogacy escrow company. All they really need is a bank account.
- [21:35]
Ben Foldy
It's just an LLC with a normal bank account like Capital One and making whatever representations they made to Capital One about where the money was and where it should go. There's not like a State regulator to knock on the door and say, hey, do you have a, you know, money services, business, business license? What are your internal procedures? Like, how do you segregate the money? How do you do all that? Like, who's going to check?
- [22:04]
Ryan Knudsen
After their experience was seen, Anna Marie and her husband still had two embryos left. They were tired and scared, but they wanted a hockey team. Remember, they still had so much love to give. They'd used up their inheritance and couldn't take out another mortgage on their house. So to save on costs, they asked a friend to be their surrogate. And last summer they tried with their fourth embryo
- [22:36]
Anna Maria Galozzi
and that ended in a miscarriage. And at that moment I decided, I can't do it again. It was, this was too much. The universe won. I, I saw the signs this time. I can't do it again. And so we, we are not doing surrogacy again.
- [23:00]
Ryan Knudsen
Even though you've got that one embryo, what do you, what are your plans with that? To be determined. Yeah. I'm sorry. Even with everything that's happened, Anna Maria says she feels grateful because despite the fertility industry's flaws, it did give her Michael, her son. He'll turn five in a few months.
- [23:33]
Anna Maria Galozzi
He's really into science right now, so I'm pretty sure he's downstairs watching Ada Twist the scientist and trying his own experiments. Our poor dogs, our poor house right now. As he takes everything apart and tries to put it back together. I am so present in the moments that I get to spend with him and I'm not taking them for granted. Yeah, I have a different outlook on life of like every day is a blessing.
- [24:01]
Ryan Knudsen
It's amazing to me also just like how hard it can be to create a little baby.
- [24:09]
Anna Maria Galozzi
A little baby that's going to torment you for the next however many years, right?
- [24:13]
Ryan Knudsen
Uh huh. Next week we'll bring you another story from the fringes of the fertility industry. I do met a potential client. They wanted 200 kids. And this time we'll get into the industry's super users. You had a client who said they wanted 200 kids? Yeah. That's all for today. Friday, March 13th. The Journal is a co production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Katherine Brewer, Victoria Dominguez, Pia Gadkari, Isabella Japal, Sophie Codner, Matt Kwong, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Allen Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Piers Singhe, Lisa Wang, Catherine Whelan, Tatiana Zamis and me, Ryan Knudsen. This episode was produced by Jeevika Verma and edited by Colin McNulty. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by so Wyler and was remixed for this episode by Peter Leonard. Additional music this week from Peter Leonard, Billy Libby, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapak, Griffin Tanner, so Wiley and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact checking this week by Mary Mathis and Kate Gallagher. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.
- [25:51]
Event Announcer
The Future of Everything is The Wall Street Journal's flagship live event, returning to New York City May 4th through 5th. Be there as CEOs, policymakers and innovators sit down with our journalists to answer the most pressing questions of the day. From finance, tech and economic policy to sports streaming and style. We're bringing together today's most compelling newsmakers for two days of conversations on what's Ahead. Listeners of this podcast can access exclusive discounted rates by visiting WSJ.com future that's WSJ.com future.