A deadbeat dad from Bukit Tinggi in Selangor has allegedly “sold off” his three kids to raise money to pay off his gambling debts—apparently fooling the mother of his kids, social services, welfare officers and the new foster parents in the process.
In a complicated story reported by the Chinese papers, it’s believed that the 25-year-old lorry driver, Chong, first thought of selling his kids when someone offered him RM100,000 for his two sons and RM20,000 for his daughter.
To separate them from their mother and his lover, 27-year-old Liew Kim Yeow, he promised to take her to Singapore to find work and sent their kids—daughter Hui Qi, five; sons Kar Hing, three, and Kar Yatt, one—to live with his mother in Seremban.
Chong and Liew never went to Singapore but broke up instead, and she went back to her mother’s in Kuala Kubu Baru. When several attempts to contact her kids failed, she lodged a police report against Chong fearing that he had indeed sold them off.
That’s when she found out he had filed a missing persons report on her, saying she had disappeared months earlier. And when she finally tracked down her kids, she learned that they were already living with new foster families.
The foster parents claim they did not pay for the kids, and that they followed proper procedures with social services and welfare departments to claim guardianship over the kids, and they have no intention of giving up custody.
Liew is now seeking the help of MCA Public Complaints A Services Department head Datuk Seri Michael Chong.
At a press conference held Tuesday, Liew told reporters Chong was a compulsive gambler who was in trouble with loan sharks. “I told him no matter how poor we were, we could not sell our children,” she said.
She added that she waited three months for his job promise to come true, but left him when nothing happened. He then thwarted all her attempts to reach their kids. “He kept giving excuses each time I wanted to see them,” she said.
In December, she remembered something he had told her before. “He once said someone had offered him a lot of money to adopt our children,” she told the media, which is when she reported him to the police. Chong has since gone into hiding.
“As there were no court orders for these ‘adoptions’, they are not legal,” said Datuk Seri Chong. “If the ‘adoptive parents’ refuse [to surrender the children], we will take them to court.”