The Journal. - Fertility Inc.: ‘Our Money Was Gone’

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

The Journal’s investigation into the wild west of the fertility industry continues, this time from an intended parent’s perspective. Ryan Knutson speaks with AnnaMaria Gallozzi, who wanted to have a child through surrogacy after a cancer diagnosis. Gallozzi and her husband set aside a large sum of money, but they lost it all when the escrow company entrusted with that cash defrauded them. WSJ’s Ben Foldy walks us through the complicated legal battle, and reveals how a lack of oversight has exposed hopeful parents to fraud.  Further Listening: - Fertility Inc.: When the Surrogate Gets Left With the Bill - The Mystery of the Mansion Filled With Surrogate Children Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This may be a difficult thing to articulate, but why did you want to have kids so badly? 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. When Anna Maria Galazzi met her husband, she says the topic of kids came up immediately. On our very first date, we went to a Capitol's 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.

How many kids did you and your husband think you wanted? 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 to the distance. Six, seven, eight, let's go for it? Yeah, let's have a full hockey team. Like, let's go. Unfortunately, for Anna Maria, her dream of building a big family would prove much harder than she anticipated. And 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. 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. 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?

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. 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. This episode is brought to you by Volkswagen. Want to go electric without sacrificing fun?

The Volkswagen ID4 is all-electric and thoughtfully designed to elevate your modern lifestyle. It's fun to drive with instant acceleration that makes city streets feel like open roads. Plus, a refined interior with innovative technology always at your fingertips. The all-electric ID4, you design. serve more fun, visit vW.ca to learn more. S-U-V-W, German-engineered for all. Anna Maria and her husband got married in 2017. And two years later, around the same time

they were trying to build a family, Anna Maria noticed something, a growing pain in her shoulder and chest. In October of 2019, I found a dime-sized lump in my breast that in two weeks, that it 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? Well, yeah, I mean, stage four, that's pretty serious. 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. Wow. You're going to do chemo every three weeks for the rest of your life? The type of cancer that Anna Maria has can get worse if there's a surge. of hormones like there is during a pregnancy.

My cancer being hormone receptive immediately stripped me of the ability to carry my own child. What went through your mind when you heard that? 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 to be a dad. 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. Hope wasn't all lost. Anna Marie 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. I'm an Italian Catholic from New York.

I knew the Catholic stance was anti-IVF, anti-surrogate. 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. 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 it was a pretty good start. The next step was finding a surrogate. To do that, they signed up with a surrogacy agency. 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.

In mid-2020, a surrogate was implanted with Anna Maria's first embryo. The transfer was successful, but ultimately ended in a miscarriage. Anna Marie and her husband were heartbroken. but decided to keep going. And then in October of 2020, we did an embryo transfer that ended us with Michael. It worked. Despite some complications,

Anna Marie 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? About $90,000. Was that all of the inheritance?

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. It had been difficult and expensive to get there, but Annamarie 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 the cost. Then, their third embryo was implanted into a surrogate. We got through the transfer. We ended up having a miscarriage. And I was so depressed, so devastated. It was incredibly hard. Our chances were dwindling to have another 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. 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. What happened to the money is after the break. 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. 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. What was so fascinating to you about it? That, it's a market. And, like, I think that makes people uncomfortable. You know, it lends itself to, like, what does a market for human life mean?

And what should it mean? And, you know, people would be like, well, you're calling it an industry. It's like, well, yeah. At the Wall Street Journal, industry is not a dirty word. Like, it's not, it's not pejorative to call something an industry. But people that are in the surrogacy world 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, 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 a 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. I think most people's experience with escrow will be a house, right?

Like the sale transaction of a house. With a house, buyers put their down payment into an escrow account, which is controlled by a third party. Once the 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. 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 any fees that come up, 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 condition has been met, this money can be released. So it's almost kind of like a administrative payment processor as much as it is an escrow.

Did you even think about escrow? Or was it just sort of among the checklist of items from the surrogacy agency? 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. Anna Maria used an escrow company called Seam, which stands for surrogate.

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. They were phenomenal.

When you say they were phenomenal, what do you mean? In our journey, there were points where our surrogate was asking for more money or at different intervals, and Seam 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. 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 them that the company had lost all their money, and they weren't the only ones. So Ben started digging into Seam. So it seemed 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 Seid also had kind of a other interests, let's say. You have built a boutique vegan grocery store, founded a luxury vegan clothing line, and you are the co-owner. of the Vegan Bay music group.

That's a host introducing Dominique's side on a podcast. Inside's response. 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. 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. These other businesses didn't seem like a big deal, but after some of their escrow payouts were delayed, seemed clients alleged that Side was funding her businesses with their money, money that they'd put aside to have children. 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. Almost all of that money came from parents putting their money into seam for escrow. 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?

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. Do you think you'll ever get any of the money back? No, that's gone. It's long gone. Yeah, I was probably used for a yacht experience. In total, according to court documents, more than 600 families lost about $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. In court filings, Dominic's side is accused of using hundreds of her clients' money in a fraudulent way to fund a lavish lifestyle. Around three dozen families ended up suing seam in Texas state court.

The families alleged breaches of contract. and fraud, and sought to recover more than $1.7 million they had on deposit at scene. They say Dominique's side use that cash for global travel, luxury expenses, and designer 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 R&B singer for trips all over the world. Anna Maria decided not to join the lawsuit, probably because she worried it would limit her ability to talk publicly about what happened.

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 a comment. The FBI office in Houston also opened an investigation into Seam. 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, well, well, the person just has to hold on in 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? Yeah, with all the rules that exist around the financial industry, it makes me wonder how this is even possible. There just isn't regulation. It's a nearly completely unregulated market. Ben says that practically anyone can set up their own surrogacy escrow company.

All they really need is a bank account. 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 money services 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? 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. And that ended in a miscarriage. And at that moment, I decided I can't do it again. This was too much. The universe won. I saw the signs this time. I can't do it again. And so we are not doing surrogacy again. Even though you've got that one embryo, what are your plans with that?

To be determined. 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. 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. It's amazing to me also just like how hard it can be to create a little baby. A little baby that's going to torment you for the next however many years, right? 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 Catherine Brewer, Victoria Dominguez. Pia Gadkari, Isabella Jopal, Sophie Codner, Matt Kwong, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de LaRosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Espinoza, Heather Rogers, Pierce, Singer, Lisa Wang, Catherine Wayland, Tatiana Zamise, and me, Ryan Knudson.

This episode was produced by Jivica Verma and edited by Colin McNulty. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wilde. and was remixed for this episode by Peter Leonard. Additional music this week from Peter Leonard, Billy Libby, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Tanner, So Wiley, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking this week by Mary Mathis and Kate Gallagher. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.