Parents beware safety breaches popular childcare services

Boasting millions of users globally, Care.com is a leading platform for caregiving services, including childcare, senior care, pet care, and housekeeping. While this matching service may be a convenient way to book a quick babysitter, there’s something all users — but especially parents — need to know about the platform.

A few years ago, an independent journalist named Edwin Dorsey dug into Care.com after his friend, who was a babysitter on the platform, told him something didn’t feel right about the company. Dorsey set to work experimenting with the website. It wasn’t long before it became crystal clear that Care.com wasn’t at all what people thought it was.

On a recent episode of “Relatable,” Dorsey joined Allie Beth Stuckey to share his dark findings.

“Care.com claimed to be a very safe place to look for babysitters, and they claimed to be running background checks,” says Dorsey. But when he did his own experiment signing up to be a babysitter, it became clear that the background checks were a myth.

“The way I tested their process is by trying to sign up as Harvey Weinstein, who was in the news a lot at the time. So I used a photo of Harvey Weinstein, I used the email [email protected], I made up a social security number, … and I consented to their background check on Care.com to be a licensed babysitter,” he recounts. “And to my amazement, I was approved.”

To make sure it wasn’t some one-off fluke, Dorsey applied to be a babysitter using the alias “Daffy Duck,” and again he was approved. “They’re telling parents they’re running background checks. They’re charging people for background checks, and then they’re not running the background checks,” he tells Allie.

When Dorsey wrote up these disturbing findings in an article that went viral, Care.com “called [his] college to get [him] in trouble” and “sent some legal letter to [his] parents’ house.” But this only made Dorsey “dig in more.”

“So then I went to every state attorney general to get consumer complaints people had filed on Care.com, and I saw tons of safety issues,” he says. “I even go to some police departments, and I ask for all 911 calls that had Care.com mentioned in the transcript because I want to see how extensive all these abuses are.”

This digging resulted in shocking revelations.

“There’s a lot of people who had criminal histories who were approved to babysit on Care.com. There’s a lot of people who had their kids taken away from them who then go become babysitters on Care.com. There’s people who’ve been banned from running day cares who are listing their services on Care.com. There’s people with DUIs and battery charges advertising themselves on Care.com — all unbeknownst to parents,” says Dorsey.

“Ultimately, there were eight kids who were given to Care.com babysitters with criminal histories, where the parents didn’t know, and the kids ended up dying,” he adds.

Dorsey ultimately linked up with Gregory Zuckerman at the Wall Street Journal, who turned his research on Care.com into a front-page exposé.

Sadly, the disturbing events Dorsey uncovered aren’t isolated to the Care.com platform. Today, Dorsey is reporting on another caregiving service — KinderCare, a chain of childcare and early education centers in the U.S. serving military families and receiving tax dollars through government subsidies for low-income families.

His investigations have exposed issues such as toddlers escaping onto busy roads, children being left alone in locked buildings or buses, and allegations of physical, verbal, and sexual abuse at KinderCare facilities. And yet these stories are getting “literally zero media reporting,” he says.

To hear more about Dorsey’s investigations, watch the clip above.

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