Norway declared on January 16th that all international adoptions would be halted for two years, pointing to several charges of illegalities. The Norwegian government explained, “The risk of document forgery is so great that we cannot be sure that the children’s legal security is safeguarded,” as the primary rationale. Before the governmental decision, there was an investigation by the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang. Last May, Verdens Gang discovered purposeful deceit in the adoption procedure and further reported that a Norwegian woman had realized through a hidden letter that she had been taken away from her biological parents in South Korea decades ago. This raised concern among Norwegian authorities, who further found that international adoption companies were essentially snatching children from their biological parents illegally for profit. However, Norway is not the only country with a discreditable record of overseas adoptions. In November 2023, Adoptionscentrum, the largest adoption agency in Sweden, declared that they would no longer accept new inquiries from South Korean children owing to suspicion of document manipulation, as reported by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Moreover, last January, the Danish International Adoption (DIA) announced a temporary halt on overseas adoptions because of several problems raised by illicit affairs. The Danish Ministry of Social Affairs described the winding down of the DIA, which had been cooperating with numerous countries, as “the most serious crisis in the area of adoption in the past decade.” The adoption scandal in Northern Europe would have an omnidirectional impact on various countries.