South Korea’s truth commission 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,

Children were falsely documented as abandoned orphans and children’s identities were switched, commission finds