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CHICAGO — Sleep-deprived and anxious about feeding their babies, tens of thousands of moms in Illinois and elsewhere recently turned to a variety of Facebook groups offering support for breastfeeding, pumping breast milk and postpartum care.

Direct responses were often remarkably prompt from the creator and admin of these groups, a Facebook user named “Cathy Marie Chan,” whose profile featured a smiling picture of a woman purporting to be a board-certified lactation consultant and founder of Chan Lactation LLC.

Via Facebook Messenger, “Cathy Marie Chan” would request photos and video recordings of the mothers’ naked breasts — and in some cases vaginal areas — for supposed health care purposes, according to multiple members of the groups and screenshots of private messages.

Some of the images of breasts that women sent were bare, others were taken while expressing milk or feeding infants; some women received specific instructions to include their face in the shot, according to group members’ recollections and screenshots of messages.

In one Facebook Messenger exchange captured in a screenshot, “Cathy Marie Chan” offered to perform “a quick assessment of your vagina with you” for a postpartum mother who was worried about a possible prolapse, a medical condition in which one or more of the pelvic organs slip down from their typical position. Multiple lactation experts said a lactation consultant would not be qualified to provide this type of assessment.

Soon members of the Facebook groups — including at least two board-certified lactation consultants — began asking for more details about “Cathy Marie Chan’s” credentials. They also questioned the nature of some of her requests for videos and photos, which seemed unnecessarily sexual and had dubious clinical or therapeutic value, according to several lactation experts.

Shortly after these questions surfaced, the “Cathy Marie Chan” Facebook profile suddenly vanished. The Facebook account was deactivated in early March and many of the various lactation and motherhood groups it created and ran — at least 17, by one group member’s count — were “archived” by Facebook because they lacked an admin, according to messages posted on some of the group sites.

“You can only review posts but not react, create new posts or add members,” the archive messages stated.

Now many of these new moms fear they were victims of what appears to be an elaborate and well-researched scam: They’re left wondering who was actually behind the now-defunct “Cathy Marie Chan” Facebook profile — and how all of the nude images and recordings they sent are being used.

A few days after her Facebook profile disappeared, “Cathy Marie Chan” admitted she wasn’t actually a board-certified lactation consultant to one Facebook group member in an email, using an email address that has since been deactivated.

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