Clarification Statement: Paperslip’s Non-Affiliation with EARS (Emergency Action for Records Storage). 

Posted to Paperslip on July 19th, 2025.

Recently, around June 2025, a new group in Korea called EARS: Emergency Action for Records Storage was formed by a group of Korean Adoptees and a DoKAD (descendant of a Korean Adoptee) named Bastiaan Seo Vin Flikweert / 신서빈. EARS’ admirable goal is to call attention to the issues surrounding the transfer of ALL Korean Adoption Agency files to NCRC (National Center for the Rights of the Child) — starting July 19th, 2025.

We want to note that Paperslip has been uniquely dedicated to the issue of WARNING KSS Adoptees and ALL Adoptees about the file transfer to NCRC since March 11th, 2025. We have previously written about our 15 month long campaign to WARN KSS Adoptees about the file transfer to NCRC here:

Paperslip Concludes A 15 Month Campaign To Warn KSS Adoptees About The File Transfer To NCRC

Until the formation of EARS just one month prior to the file transfer to NCRC, Paperslip was the ONLY organization of any kind to consistently talk about and warn Korean Adoptees about this historical transfer of Korean Adoption Agency files to NCRC.

We want to pre-empt any misunderstanding as to why Paperslip is not affiliated with EARS, since we share similar goals with respect to the file transfer to NCRC. We do fundamentally support the goals of EARS in attempting to defend the rights of Korean Adoptees, but it’s important to understand why Paperslip and EARS are not affiliated with one another.

Unfortunately on January 1st, 2023, the Danish led organization Danish Korean Rights Group (DKRG) deliberately gave false credit to then DKRG supporter and now EARS founding member Bastiaan Seo Vin Flikweert for our original KSS K-Number research, on a forum from which Paperslip’s Co-Founder — me — had been blocked by DKRG leaders. I had already by this time given up on communication with DKRG, which had ghosted me for no reason from December 7th, 2022 forward — the very day that the TRC investigation into Overseas Adoption began. I tried hard to resolve the issue of DKRG’s having given Bastiaan false credit for my work privately with Bastiaan, but for over one year, he refused to even privately admit that he had had no role in my original research into KSS K-numbers, which was deeply tied to my personal investigation into the switch case of my deceased twin sister, whose existence I had only discovered by accident in 2020 at my Korean Adoption Agency, KSS (Korea Social Service). Bastiaan knew I couldn’t defend myself on DKRG forums from which I was blocked — so he was content to tacitly accept false credit for my work for over one year, until I was finally able to call him out publicly. My original research was only made public on Paperslip in response to the false attribution given to Bastiaan by DKRG — myself and the KSS Adoptee community had never intended to make it public:

KSS K-Numbers

It was in large part due to this treatment by both DKRG and Bastiaan that I withdrew my TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) case in March 2023, despite my case being amongst the first 34 cases accepted by the TRC. Ironically my case had been accepted by the TRC just days after DKRG blocked me from all DKRG / TRC related forums, in December 2022. The multiple punches thrown at me by DKRG and its (then) acolyte Bastiaan ultimately cost me the chance to obtain justice for myself and my twin sister through the historic TRC investigation into Overseas Adoption (2022-2025). Ironically I had been the first Korean Adoptee to submit any Korean Adoptee cases (albeit informally) to the TRC, on December 18th, 2020 — before DKRG was formed, and before the official investigation into Overseas Adoption even began.

My investigation into my own and my twin sister’s deeply falsified cases is what led to the creation of Paperslip in 2020. I had been conducting informal research into KSS K-Numbers since 2020 on a private forum for KSS Adoptees — research which was witnessed by hundreds of KSS Adoptees around the world, including by Bastiaan’s parents. I made the unfortunate mistake of discussing my research — which was never meant to be public — with Bastiaan in February 2022, which was prior to when DKRG was formed in April or May 2022. I had no knowledge of DKRG at the time, and had informed Bastiaan of my research in confidence. After DKRG gave Bastiaan false credit for my work on January 1st, 2023 — on a forum from which DKRG had blocked me for no reason, and on which I could not defend myself, which Bastiaan knew — I would have gladly let the matter go had Bastiaan admitted even privately that he had had no role in my research. Instead, he egregiously doubled down on the lie, and informed me that I had the hypothesis (about KSS K-Number encoding), but he had the proof. This is utterly ridiculous considering I had already solved KSS’ first digit K-number codes by 2021, which had been confirmed by KSS’ Director in the presence of an Associated Press (AP) journalist in Summer 2021.

Below are my posts from January 14th and September 11th, 2021, to the KSS Adoptee forum which I moderate. Since 2020, I’ve led research there on KSS K-number patterns, with participation from several hundred KSS Adoptees across the U.S., the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland—the only countries to which KSS facilitated adoptions between 1964 and 2012.

These posts clearly document that I had already deciphered the meaning of KSS’s first-digit K-number codes prior to confidentially sharing the information with Bastiaan in February 2022. It’s notable that KSS’ Director confirmed these codes in the presence of an AP journalist in Summer 2021 during my visit to KSS:

Below - Screenshot of the conversation I had with Bastiaan on January 1st, 2023, after multiple Danish Adoptees alerted me of Bastiaan having been given false credit for my research by a DKRG leader on a forum from which I had been blocked. Having no ability to defend myself on the forum, I attempted right away to resolve this privately. However, I was shocked when Bastiaan doubled down on the lie, and said that “There was no physical evidence for your decoding”. He later arrogantly and falsely informed me that I had had the hypothesis, but he had the proof:

The AP article from October 14th, 2024 stated: “(She) threw herself into examining the complex numerical system KSS used to log adoption cases, based on hundreds of case numbers she collected from other KSS adoptees. In 2021, she revisited the agency with a long wish list of files.

The meeting, which the AP attended, resulted in a tense back-and-forth for hours with the same long-time social worker.”

Before the AP article came out to finally settle the matter, I only succeeded in getting Bastiaan to confess that he had had nothing to do with my research after over one year by laboriously creating and paying for a purpose built website, and finally being able to call him out on a non-DKRG forum of which we were both members, from which DKRG was not able to block me. Within one day of my calling him out, Bastiaan finally confessed that he had had nothing to do with my KSS K-Number research. Note that this all happened before the AP article about my case was published on October 14th, 2024, which confirmed my collection of hundreds of KSS K-Numbers in the course of my investigation into my and my twin’s cases, and confirmed my visit to KSS in Summer 2021 with an AP journalist with a list of KSS K-Numbers and KSS K-Number codes which I had already solved by then. It’s still amazing and disgusting to me how much energy and effort it took for me to get someone to tell the simple TRUTH about my work. Multiple Danish Adoptees with active TRC cases who had publicly defended my work on the DKRG forum were almost immediately blocked from DKRG/TRC-related platforms—cutting them off from three years' worth of TRC information, as DKRG had positioned itself as the sole voice of the TRC.

Below is Bastiaan’s admission that he had nothing to do with my KSS K-Number research, shared to what I had thought was an Adoptee only forum on February 17th, 2024 — when Bastiaan (a non-Adoptee) popped up on this forum, I was finally able to publicly call him out, and his admission shortly followed:

I give a one-handed clap to Bastiaan for at least finally admitting wrongdoing — though it’s worth noting this only came after he was publicly called out. What’s important to clarify here is that, despite Bastiaan’s slick statement, I already had the “hard evidence” of KSS’ K-number encoding back in 2021. I had collected and collated hundreds of K-numbers from KSS Adoptees starting in 2020. The Director of KSS had confirmed these codes in person in the presence of an AP journalist during a visit to KSS in Summer 2021 — which is before I had made the mistake of talking to Bastiaan in February 2022.

Any so-called “hard evidence” that Bastiaan later uncovered (which, by the way, he never shared with me) only came AFTER I had already informed him of the KSS K-Number codes I had successfully decoded—and after KSS had confirmed their validity. By 2021, I had already determined that KSS was assigning encoded K-Numbers to children at the Orphanage level. So Bastiaan’s claim that the key issue wasn’t the encoding itself, but the timing of the encoding, was not an original insight on his part. In fact, everything for which he later accepted false credit had already been discovered by me before I ever discussed my research with him.

Even in his so-called admission, Bastiaan misleads readers by claiming he found the “hard evidence” himself. In reality, I had already gathered that evidence by the time I shared my research with him in February 2022. This included a detailed spreadsheet of hundreds of KSS Adoptee K-numbers, compiled with the support of the KSS Adoptee community, which I had intended to present to the TRC, which had the KSS Adoptee community’s full backing.

Let’s be clear: if I hadn’t told Bastiaan about my research, he never would have known to start looking for that “proof.” Once I did, he clearly saw an opportunity — and seized it, attempting to claim credit for himself by going in search of evidence I had already uncovered and explained to him. Both a lawyer and Korean scholar I have discussed this situation with agree that had credit ever been given to Bastiaan in the media for my work — which I suspect it would have been, had I not been able to call him out before things got to that point — this would have been a clear case of Academic fraud. And if my research is ever attributed to Bastiaan in any publication — whether English, Dutch, Korean, or in any other language — I will definitely be making that fact widely known.

You have to understand that this was all happening in the midst of the TRC 2 investigation, which was receiving a lot of media attention — and that Bastiaan is an ambitious person keen to have influence in the Korean Adoptee world just like his KSS Adoptee parents — despite not being a Korean Adoptee himself. Despite knowing that I had done the KSS K-number research, a KSS Adoptee friend of Bastiaan’s parents even pressured me to let Bastiaan accept false credit for my work — a proposal I still find ludicrous, sexist, and illogical.

Bastiaan, his parents, and the KSS Adoptee who pressured me to allow Bastiaan to receive false credit for my research, despite all of them knowing that it was me who did it — are all part of an organization called NLKRG (Netherlands Korean Rights Group) — which was only founded around 2022 and is a partner organization of DKRG. I didn’t know this at the time, but according to various Dutch sources, NLKRG receives the equivalent of thousands of dollars per year from both the Korean Government and Dutch Governments for their work with Korean Adoptees in the Netherlands (almost ALL Dutch Korean Adoptees were adopted through KSS). I never understood why I was being pressured to allow Bastiaan to receive false credit for my work, and I can’t prove a relationship between this attempt and NLKRG’s extensive amount of funding — but we all know that money can be a powerful motivation for strange behavior sometimes. NLKRG now backs EARS.

After giving Bastiaan false credit for my work on January 1st, 2023, DKRG actively prevented me from meeting with the TRC in February 2023, so that I could NOT present my own evidence — this is because DKRG wanted total credit for my research. I had booked a trip to Korea to present my research to the TRC, and TRC had confirmed my appointment by email — but for unknown reasons, the TRC investigators CC’d DKRG leaders on their response email to me. DKRG then posted the next day to forums from which I was blocked that “Adoptees should not try to be first in line to talk to the TRC” — and shortly after that, TRC cancelled my appointment. I had to cancel my trip to Korea, losing significant money in the process. It was at this point in March 2023 that in a significant state of anguish that I decided to withdraw my TRC case.

I want to note that the KSS Adoptee community was strongly in support of my sharing with the TRC investigators what I had discovered in my years of unique research into KSS — but DKRG maliciously deprived me of the opportunity to do so — grotesquely because they could not stand the thought of anyone else getting credit in the TRC.

DKRG has never demonstrated the maturity to acknowledge wrongdoing. Some suggest they threw poor, young Bastiaan under the bus. But Bastiaan had ample opportunity to clarify privately that he played no role in my research — yet he never did. Instead, he arrogantly doubled down on the falsehood, a lie that only came to light once I was finally able to call him out publicly. When I encountered him at the IKAA (International Korean Adoptee Associations) conference in the Summer of 2023 — before I had gone public — he openly smirked at me, ironically following a research conference, since at the time he was fully aware of the undeserved credit he was still receiving for my work. Bastiaan was fully aware that he was benefitting from my being sidelined by DKRG, and never seemed bothered by the fact that DKRG sidelined myself and many others — he remained firmly a part of the DKRG inner circle. Had I not later spoken out, I’m certain he would have continued to silently benefit from DKRG’s false attribution of credit for my work indefinitely.

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Below: EARS’ list of supporters as of July 19th, 2025. Apart from Paperslip — whose reasons I think are clear for not publicly supporting EARS — notice anyone missing from this list of supporters?

Notably absent are DKRG (Danish Korean Rights Group) and KoRoot (the NGO which is now run by DKRG’s Peter Moeller and Boonyoung / Tina Han). Also notably absent is Ibyang International, the group run by DKRG’s Boonyoung / Tina Han.

Bastiaan worked closely with DKRG from 2022-2025 — so why aren’t DKRG, KoRoot, and Ibyang International supporting EARS — specifically as of July 19th, 2025, the start date of the historical transfer of ALL Korean Adoption Agency files to NCRC? DKRG truly cares about Adoptee Rights, and not just about being the only ones in the spotlight — right? Right?

Draw your own conclusions…

It’s ironic — though unfortunately not surprising — that now that EARS has formed independently of DKRG, DKRG has apparently chosen not to publicly support this new organization. DKRG’s behavior toward me was consistently shaped by a desire to dominate the media spotlight and to exclude anyone it considered to be “competition” — which they have bizarrely always seen me as, even though I was fully willing to cooperate with them back in 2022. After initially approaching me for help in August 2022 — a request I gladly accepted — DKRG ultimately pushed me out of the movement permanently after hoovering up all the information from me that they could, before going to the press with some of that information (and of course, never crediting me or Paperslip). I have never heard from them since, despite repeated attempts at contact.

The timing was telling: DKRG excluded me on December 7th, 2022 — immediately after they had gathered all the information they needed from me for the TRC, and on the very day that the TRC 2 investigation into Overseas Adoption commenced. The information DKRG collected included my adoption paperwork and the document I had signed granting Peter Moeller legal representation on my behalf — a decision I later deeply regretted upon learning that he is NOT, in fact, a lawyer. I had previously participated willingly in Boonyoung / Tina Han’s KICA (Korean Inter Country Adoption) study and had even referred numerous Adoptees to her study. Never did I expect that she would later slam the proverbial door so rudely in my face.

DKRG also obtained the KSS K-number codes I had painstakingly decoded through my research — research that Boonyoung / Tina Han had witnessed firsthand and to which she had even contributed her own K-number. Ironically, my findings were later echoed by DKRG supporter Bastiaan, whose own rushed research began without informing me only after I had already shared the results of my work with him. It's easy to find the treasure when you’ve already been handed the map.

In truth, however, I had not only drawn the proverbial map — I had already discovered the proverbial treasure. At the time, however, my KSS K-number findings remained private, shared only on Paperslip, then a password-protected website intended solely for KSS Adoptees. The site was not public at the time that I shared my findings with Bastiaan, and neither I nor the KSS Adoptee community ever intended to release the research broadly. We kept it confidential for three years — until DKRG exposed it without our consent and falsely claimed credit for the discovery to serve their own interests.

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Fast forward to the present day in 2025—three years later: the TRC 2 (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2) investigation into Overseas Adoption is now nearing its end, and Adoptees are awaiting the start of TRC 3. Once again, the public face of TRC 3 will be DKRG. That’s why I’m especially grateful to have been able to investigate my own case independently and to remain completely free from the wretched mess of the TRC process as helmed by DKRG.

Now that EARS has begun to enter the media spotlight — eagerly following the playbook laid down by DKRG — I suspect that DKRG will treat EARS much the same way that they have treated me from 2022 forward — namely, as competition. Tellingly, both DKRG and KoRoot — the longstanding NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) which DKRG’s Peter Moeller and Boonyoung / Tina Han are also now in charge of — are noticeably absent from the list of EARS supporters on their website. Unfortunately, DKRG seems unable to tolerate the existence of any group they perceive as “competition.” For Bastiaan Seo Vin Flikweert / 신서빈 — a former DKRG supporter and now founder of EARS — it’s a rather pathetic, disappointing, yet entirely predictable form of Karma, (dis)courtesy of DKRG.

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It is because of this past history that EARS obviously did not attempt to reach out to me at Paperslip for help with their recent effort — which began just one month prior to the movement of all Korean Adoption Agency files to NCRC.

I want to be clear that I fundamentally support the mission of EARS in principle. However, I also believe that those advocating for the ethical behavior of the Korean Government must themselves act ethically toward Korean Adoptees. It is no small matter for me to have been deliberately denied the opportunity to seek justice—for both myself and my deceased twin sister—through a historic TRC investigation into Overseas Adoption, from which I was unjustly excluded, and for which in no small part I laid the foundation through my years of work with Paperslip. It was especially difficult to witness others attempt to take credit for my work, while presenting themselves in the media for years as wholly virtuous champions of Adoptee justice. I know I am not alone in this experience. Many Adoptees who have made meaningful contributions to the movement have been sidelined by the very people who claim to defend our rights.

I do not want people to get the false impression that Paperslip does not support what EARS is doing — Paperslip does support the fundamental mission of EARS — but of course cannot support or condone the long-term behavior of one of its founders.

I also want to be clear that I certainly don’t personally hold it against anyone that supports EARS.

While I have been relentlessly punished by some ruthless DKRG supporters for telling the truth — I will not cease to do so. My twin’s unjust death will not be — and has not been — for nothing.

I hope this message will be received with understanding. May those with ears hear.

Thank you for listening.