We've had an extremely disappointing experience in working with this agency, as our interactions…read morewith them have caused us undue stress, anxiety, and emotional pain.
We were recommended to Kenia and EWS by word of mouth through a friend who talked with them before, received a good impression, and also knew someone who worked well with them before. We proceeded to talk with them, also got initial good impressions, and vetted them through IPs and clinicians who worked with them before (though those references were provided solely by them).
During the time before money ever changed hands, the agency was quite responsive. After the New Year, we finally decide to sign a retainer agreement with them (with a one year expiration term) and wired them an initial agency fee. Afterwards, they quickly mentioned that they'll get back to us shortly with a receipt and potential surrogate matches.
More than half a week goes by with absolute radio silence (no receipts, no surrogates), which is definitely much longer than their time to reply the week before, and we start to get slightly worried. This prompts us to do a little bit of online searching, we see this very alarming news story (https://abc7.com/elite-women-surrogacy-pregnancy-surrogate-mother-fertility-clinic/14216964/). Not knowing about this before, we start to get really worried, and request a phone call.
Kenia agrees to the phone call. She explains her side of the story, and tries to reassure us that everything is still good. However, we inform her that regardless, the risk is too high for us to continue to work with her (this is still only 4-5 days after the agreement + initial wire), and request that she refund us back the agency fee. She agrees to consider the refund, says she will talk with her lawyer (puzzling as to why this is necessary), and as a show of "good faith", asks us to email her our wire information for the refund.
All of this happened (as of this time) 2.5 weeks ago. During this time, we've had a couple of back and forth email exchanges. In this case, we always do the initiation for her to give us an update on when can we get the refund resolved, and in her case, she always comes back with a "vague" reply, saying that it's being "worked on", and that she's still working on it "with her lawyer". When we ask her why it needs to take so long, and why does it need to involve a lawyer to give a refund back for money that we had just sent her not too long ago, she mentioned that it's for her own "legal protection". What's especially revealing is that we've at least sent her 2 very direct emails asking her to give us exact ETAs on the latest that we can expect the refund to be resolved by (a very reasonable ask), and in those cases, those emails are ghosted and never directly addressed.
We asked around for legal advice from lawyers that the EWS website ITSELF listed as folks that they've worked with, and they tell us a few things, 1) stop working with them, and 2) their opinion is that we're probably not going to get our money back =( Now, we're in this situation where we're definitely traumatized by our interactions with this surrogacy agency, with very low hopes/prayers of recouping a huge sum of wasted money (the only time that we ever got back an email related to any service/surrogacy matching after money exchanged hands was a reply that we had requested on the day that we asked for a phone call to discuss the ABC news story).