ETHERFAX and FaxCore Strengthen the ADAM Program to Support the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® (NCMEC) is a private, non-profit organization whose mission is to help find missing children, reduce child sexual exploitation, and prevent child victimization. NCMEC works with families, victims, survivors, private industry, law enforcement, and the public to assist with preventing child abductions, recovering missing children, and providing services to deter and combat child sexual exploitation. In 2000, LexisNexis® Risk Solutions partnered with NCMEC and created the ADAM™ Program to help locate missing children as quickly as possible.
NCMEC uses the ADAM Program to broadcast information about missing children across fax, email and SMS. The faxing technology of the ADAM Program integrates ETHERFAX to quickly distribute posters containing a photo of the missing child and case details to police, news media, schools, businesses, medical centers, and individuals within a specific, targeted geographic area. The program is named in honor of Adam Walsh, who went missing in 1981 and helped inspire the founding of NCMEC in 1984.
In 2025, NCMEC assisted law enforcement and families with more than 32,000 cases of missing children and distributed over 1.8 million missing child poster alerts through the ADAM Program.
The Challenge: Reliable Communication for Missing Children
When a child goes missing, time is of the essence. Any delay in distributing information could prevent missing children from being recognized and recovered safely. Fax is a vital component of the ADAM Program technology stack. Busy signals, failed transmissions, and network downtime is unacceptable.
NCMEC sends posters via the ADAM Program to law enforcement agencies, businesses, and organizations within a targeted geographic region, and a reliable fax solution was needed to help bring these missing children home.
“In just 24 hours, we typically send an average of 10,000 or more alerts to targeted locations. Now with ETHERFAX, these alerts can be distributed in minutes.”
Patti Willingham, Executive Director of Case Management Services at NCMEC
The Solution: Cloud-Powered Reliability
Working with Ingenium Software, a technology service provider, ETHERFAX and FaxCore were successfully implemented. Together, the two partner companies deliver a hybrid-cloud fax solution to power the ADAM Program, providing secure, reliable, and accelerated document delivery. ETHERFAX and FaxCore currently support more than 100,000 faxes per month for the ADAM Program. Leveraging the ETHERFAX network, high-resolution posters containing images and information about missing children are sent with superior clarity to law enforcement, media, schools, businesses, medical centers, libraries, retail stores, and churches. Information is also emailed to ADAM Program participants along with a link to the poster so that it can be easily shared.
“In just 24 hours, we typically send an average of 10,000 or more alerts to targeted locations,” said Patti Willingham, Executive Director of Case Management Services at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “Now with ETHERFAX, these alerts can be distributed in minutes.”
ETHERFAX and FaxCore originally supported 48 fax lines for sending missing child alerts through the ADAM Program. To support growing demand and accelerate the distribution of alerts, the ADAM Program expanded its fax infrastructure to 144 fax lines. This significant increase in capacity allows the ADAM Program to send more alerts simultaneously, reduce transmission delays, and enable critical posters and case information to reach targeted geographic areas faster.
“The migration to Faxcore Ev6 replaced the .net method with a more modern RESTful API. This simplified approach, along with tripling the number of fax channels, has significantly helped speed up the delivery of critical faxes,” said Doug Olive, President of Ingenium Software.
ETHERFAX also ensures that the ADAM Program maintains deliverability, uptime, and business continuity at all times. ETHERFAX high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) delivers increased reliability, and built-in redundancy provides seamless delivery with multiple call routing options to ensure mission-critical faxes are delivered to the ADAM Program network.
As a result of these upgrades to its technology stack, the ADAM Program has benefited from improved speed and scalability. The organization has doubled its sending capacity and is now delivering notifications three times faster than before.
“By upgrading our FaxCore platform and increasing the number of channels it uses, we’ve significantly increased the speed of sending out missing child posters to targeted areas across the country,” said Tim Grabowski, Systems Engineer at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “This increase ensures that critical time sensitive information reaches more communities faster, ultimately supporting the mission of bringing missing children home.”
Alerts used to take days to process with a previous system. With ETHERFAX, they can be processed in minutes.
The Results: Reuniting Families
“ETHERFAX has helped us with the rapid distribution of thousands of posters each month,” said Willingham. “With the built-in reporting capabilities that ETHERFAX provides, we can easily monitor the success rate of our poster distributions and also measure the volume of pending alerts. This has proved beneficial when a critical case needs to be prioritized to the top of the outgoing fax queue.”
Since its inception in 2000, more than 94% of the missing children cases distributed through the ADAM Program are now resolved through photo distribution or other efforts.
“When we hear that a child has been safely recovered and reunited with their family as a result of the ADAM Program, this is proof that the technology we take for granted everyday can make such a huge impact to benefit the community,” said Trish McCall, Senior Director of LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Co-Founder of the ADAM Program.
Help Us Bring Missing Children Home: Receive ADAM Alerts in Your Area
All it takes is just one person to make a meaningful impact.
Businesses, organizations, and individuals can all become part of the ADAM Program network by signing up to receive targeted missing child notifications in their local area. Expanding the network means critical alerts can reach more people faster, increasing the chances that someone will recognize a missing child and provide information that helps authorities support a safe recovery.
Every new participant helps broaden awareness within the communities where it matters most. Whether shared in an office, storefront, school, or healthcare facility, each alert has the potential to generate the tip that brings a child home safely.
Sign up today to receive alerts from the ADAM Program.
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