Horrible Parents Try To Sell Baby For Less Than $6K In Disturbing eBay Listing

She's been on this earth for just 40 days, and her parents have tried to sell her.

Now, the mother and father are the subject of an investigation by German police who were tipped off by a disturbing eBay listing this week.

According to Agence France-Presse – France's Associated Press, if you will – the baby was listed for sale on eBay for about 30 minutes on Tuesday. The asking price? €5,000, which is just over $5,500.

An eBay spokesman told ZDF, a German broadcaster, that the police were alerted to the listing by the company's employees.

After police in the city of Duisburg raided the parents' apartment, the daughter was handed over to Child Protective Services, AFP said. Now, the authorities are carrying out their investigation under the suspicion of human trafficking.

The mother and father – who are 20 and 28, respectively – both confirmed that the pictures on the listing were indeed photos of their daughter. The police also found that the internet connection used to post the listing was theirs as well.

However, AFP's report notes that the connection was not secure, and could therefore have been used by someone else.

The job going forward for police appears to be discovering whether the listing was an actual attempt to sell a child or all part of a sick joke made by either the 20-something parents or someone else.

In some cases, such investigations usually lead to the discovery that a prank was behind the suspicious event. Just this week, police in Wisconsin confirmed a mysterious YouTube video that showed a woman tied and gagged in a closet was a prank, and therefore not related to the missing person's case of Kayla Berg, who disappeared in 2009.

In other cases, the reality of human trafficking is all too real. Just last week, Chinese police made arrests after a 40-year-old man took a pregnant 12-year-old girl to the hospital for a checkup.

Citations: AFP