The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is the one entity that seems best positioned to step into the breach and bring order to all this chaos. Although the NCMEC is ostensibly an independent nonprofit, it gets considerable funding — $67 million in 2014 — from the federal government. Opinions on its effectiveness vary wildly. Reed says that the NCMEC is “completely inept.”

“All they do is run a website, create fliers, and that’s it,” she says. And when newer photos of Bianca were found, getting it to update the fliers proved an ordeal. "The entire time I was with the congressman’s office, they essentially did nothing. ‘She’s on our website,’ ‘We have flyers out there,' was all they’d do.” (A recent check of Bianca Lozano’s profile on the NCMEC website had an updated photo, but in one spot it misstates the date of her disappearance by 17 years.)

On its website, the NCMEC claims to have helped recover over 199,000 children since its founding in 1984, with a recovery rate of 97%. When I spoke to Bob Lowery, vice president of the NCMEC’s Missing Children Division, he said the actual number now is closer to 98% or 99%. Some question these figures, noting that the NCMEC takes credit for “helping” to recover children in cases it had virtually no involvement in. In some cases, these children were never actually missing (merely reported so by a panicky parent), or were returned by a noncustodial parent within hours of being reported. Critics of the NCMEC say it overstates its usefulness to justify its federal funding, and in doing so distorts public perception about the nature of the problem.

When I spoke to Marc Klaas, who founded the KlaasKids Foundation to aid in the recovery of missing children after his own daughter, Polly, was abducted and murdered back in 1993, he launched, unprompted, into a bitter condemnation of the NCMEC.

“I’ve got a real beef with these characters,” he says. “They don’t really go in the field. They don’t really get involved in any except the high-profile cases. They’ve done more to harm the missing child — I don’t want to call it an industry, but missing child nonprofit organizations — than any other single entity out there. They work very hard to make sure every dollar involved in missing children goes directly to them. They don’t share any resources whatsoever, and I can tell you from personal experience they’ll go out of their way to undermine anybody that might threaten their position. ... They’re just guys in the middle vacuuming up money. I loathe the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and think missing kids would be better served if they didn’t exist.”

Lowery, not surprisingly, takes issue with these portrayals.

“Those are misinformed impressions about the National Center’s work,” he says. “The work here in the Missing Children’s Division is much more comprehensive than simply creating a poster and distributing it. ... All our teams are former law enforcement or social services with a great deal of experience in finding children. We do extensive case analysis work, we work social media, we have law enforcement partners in our building working side by side with us, so when leads come in that need law enforcement activity right away, we’re getting it.”

There are dozens of other nonprofits that focus on recovering missing children, though sorting the merely well-intentioned from those actually well-equipped to help can be tricky (never mind the ones devoted mostly to collecting donations, including the Committee for Missing Children, Operation Lookout National Center for Missing Youth, and Find the Children, three of the 50 worst charities in the country, according to an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting).

A few years after Bianca went missing, Hebert met with Mark Miller, founder of the American Association for Lost Children, a nonprofit that, according to its website, conducts “hands-on investigations, while traveling in and outside the country performing surveillance and undercover work searching for and rescuing missing children.” Hebert says Miller convinced another mother whose own children were missing to date one of Lozano’s cousins in order to try to get information on Lozano’s whereabouts.

“After a few dates, in the throes of whatever they were in the middle of, she confessed that she was working for Miller and the whole thing blew up in her face,” Hebert says. Later, when Hebert was organizing a concert to raise money for her continuing search efforts, she got into a dispute with Miller over what percentage of the proceeds would go to his organization. In the end, she says, “I don’t really know a lot of what he did or didn’t do working on Bianca’s case.”

(When contacted, Miller says that he encourages all parents to “be on our team,” and help out with cases other than their own. He contends that although the other mother blew their cover, she did help procure useful information. He also insists that the money he wanted Hebert to donate to his charity was going to directly fund her case. According to Miller, the foundation spent thousands of dollars on Hebert’s case and she “never donated one penny to the charity.”)

With both government agencies and nonprofits often creating more confusion than they alleviate, many parents turn to private investigators. Unfortunately, the world of PIs is possibly even more opaque. Licensing varies from state to state, and in most cases doesn’t seem particularly rigorous. According to Lessan, the main advantage a licensed investigator has over an unlicensed one is a badge. “To be honest,” she says, "people don’t know that there’s no difference."

Given this landscape, it’s not surprising that nightmare stories of PIs ripping off parents are legion. In 2009, an investigator in Arizona was indicted on five counts of wire fraud relating to charges that he created a fake abducted child recovery company, Delta International, which collected huge fees from parents and delivered virtually nothing in return. Gus Zamora, an ex–Army Ranger whose renown for recovering children abducted internationally has garnered him features on Dateline and in The Atlantic, has also been accused, multiple times, of defrauding parents.

Hebert first hired a PI based in Houston a few months after Lozano absconded with Bianca. She says she traveled to Mexico four times with this investigator, who insisted he’d seen Bianca while doing surveillance down there for her.

“We were going to go down there again, rent a plane, hire these guys with guns, kidnap my daughter, and bring her back,” says Hebert. But she wasn’t too confident in this plan, and was running out of money. Around the same time, she met Don Feeney, an ex–Delta Force commando working in private security consulting, who’d helped retrieve kidnapped children before. She decided to spend the last $10,000 she could get her hands on — money that her mother had to borrow from Hebert's grandparents — to pay Feeney to follow up on the earlier investigator’s information. “They came back and said, ‘This is not your daughter and not your ex-husband. You would’ve been in a world of trouble if you’d kidnapped that girl and tried to come back here with her.’ It was crazy.”