Ma'am, your reservation in Hell is confirmed.

Can you use OpenTable.com to reserve spots in Hell? If so, there's a table for one saved for Maya-Anne Mays.

As reported in a jaw-dropping article in today's San Francisco Chronicle, in 2004 Mays bilked couples out of thousands of dollars by claiming that she was pregnant and going to let them adopt her child. But there was no baby: just a whopper of a lie about a stillborn girl. Mays was convicted in 2004 of three counts of grand theft, and served three years in prison.

Out on parole, she was arrested this week for doing the same thing again to couples in North Carolina. The lies she told? Well, the mind reels.

It takes a special kind of evil to cheat people who are trying desperately to build a family. One of her victims, who was defrauded out of almost $12,000, said:

"These are people that have probably tried every way to build a family. For lots of people, this is a last-ditch effort. They want to do anything to have a child, so they're especially vulnerable."

There are worse crimes, of course. I've been avoiding writing about some of the horrific cases of child abuse in the news recently not only because they kill me inside but also plunge me (and a lot of others suffering from infertility) into the "Why do some people get to have kids and I don't?" game.

It's quite likely that Mays is mentally ill. I don't really care. I just hope that she gets put away this time for a long, long while. And I pray that if I go the adoption route, I never meet anyone like her.