How Woman Fooled Ex She Had Aborted Pregnancy & Sold Baby

A pregnant mum reportedly conned her ex-boyfriend into thinking she had terminated her pregnancy, and allegedly sold their newborn baby to her gay best friend for £100.

DailyMail reports;

Steven North, 34, from Perth, Perthshire, was devastated when 29-year-old Vikki Gilmore, with whom he had a brief relationship in 2010, told him she would be aborting their unborn daughter.

But months later, it emerged Gilmore had kept the child so she could give it to Chris Yates, 35, who pretended to have received the child via a surrogate.

The extraordinary hoax began when Gilmore told Mr North that she was pregnant with his child. When she told him she was having an abortion, Mr North tried to persuade her to change her mind.

But Gilmore insisted she was having the termination. Even when Mr North noticed she was wearing baggy clothes when he saw her at the local pub, and asked her if she was pregnant, Gilmore denied it.

Gilmore then disappeared for five months. At the same time, Mr North saw a Facebook post by Yates, which revealed that he was going to be a father from a surrogate mother in Dundee.

Yates and Gilmore then went to extreme lengths to back up their story. The court heard how the pair set up a fake Facebook profile for the fictional surrogate mother, whom they named Clare Green. They claimed she went on to give Yates full custody.

But Mr North grew suspicious when the ‘surrogate’ baby was born in February 2011, five months after Yates’s announcement. The truth emerged when a mutual friend went to visit the baby – and saw that the birth certificate featured Gilmore’s name.

Police believe Gilmore may have sold her daughter to her co-accused for between £100 and £300, but that allegation was not proved when they appeared at Perth Sheriff Court.

The jury was told how, despite that discovery, Gilmore continued to claim that she did not give birth to the child at all.

She later told council officials that she had gone through with an abortion, but fell pregnant for a second time after sleeping with Yates following a pub crawl to mark his birthday.

After putting his name on the birth certificate, the pair persisted with their elaborate story, duping the NHS, the local registrar and council officials in a scam which rumbled on for nearly three years.

As his suspicions grew, Mr North reported the fraud to police. But he was told to pursue the case as a civil, rather than criminal matter. He also tried to go through social services but had no parental right because he was not named on the birth certificate.

But, in May 2013, when his girl was 27 months, Mr North finally won the right to a DNA test. That showed that he was 99.99 per cent certain to be the father.

At that time, Yates ‘went into hiding’, moving to Glasgow with the child. It took months for Mr North to finally be able to see his daughter and, even then, he was only allowed supervised contact with her for half an hour a week.

He was also banned from revealing that he was the little’s girl father and instead had to pretend he was a friend.

In January 2014, Mr North was finally granted custody by Glasgow Sheriff Court and his daughter moved in with him and his wife Dana.

Then, in June this year, Gilmore and Yates were found guilty of deception following the week-long trial.

They were jailed for three years each, however, Mr North said no sentence could make up for the years he has lost with his traumatised child.

He told The Sun: ‘How could a mother ever think up something like this? It’s pure evil. The whole thing was a sick pantomime. Neither showed any remorse. My daughter is traumatised by being pushed from pillar to post. We’ve been trying to pick up the pieces.’