Police in China have recently busted four major online baby trafficking groups and saved 382 babies in a largest-scale crackdown on the sale of children.

A total of 1,094 suspects were seized across the country in a joint maneuver which involved police in 27 provincial-level regions, the Ministry of Public Security said on Thursday.

According to a statement released to the Global Times, police in Beijing and East China's Jiangsu Province discovered last year that a website called the Yuanmeng Adoption Home had been buying and selling babies, with their operations disguised as adoptions.

The discovery soon led to an in-depth investigation which revealed that three other websites and 30 Tencent QQ chat groups were also involved in baby trafficking crimes.

Zhou Daifu, 26, believed to be one of the key operators of the Yuanmeng Adoption Home, told the police that he established the website to profit from the illicit trade.

Zhou admitted that his website charged a 4 percent to 6 percent service fee from both the buyer and the seller after a baby was sold. He also confessed that his group had bought babies from impoverished families and traffickers at 2,000 yuan ($325) each and twins at 3,500 yuan. He then sold them at more than triple the price and used a Taobao account disguised as an online jewelry shop to manage the influx of funds.

According to a circular released in 2010, parents selling their own children for profit can be prosecuted under the charge of child trafficking. Those who provide a platform for these illicit trades or buy children will face the same criminal charge.

"The 382 babies have now been placed in welfare centers and the civil affairs authorities will either return them to their birth parents or find proper foster families for the babies," an official from the Ministry of Public Security told the Global Times on Friday.

The authorities will press charges against parents who sold their children. For babies who were abducted and whose parents cannot be immediately located, police will register their DNA sample into a database of abducted children, hoping it will lead to future tip-offs about their parents' whereabouts, said the statement.

China has stepped up efforts to crack down on baby trafficking crimes over the past few years. In January, Shaanxi obstetrician Zhang Shuxia was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for selling seven babies to human traffickers. Zhou and other lead suspects could face a similar sentence, lawyers told the Global Times.

Zhang Zhiwei, a Beijing lawyer who specializes in protecting children's rights, told the Global Times on Friday that it is not unusual for impoverished parents in rural areas to give away babies and receive a certain amount of compensation.

"The line between selling babies and giving them away for adoption is still ambiguous. With the wealth gaps among China's provinces, a justified amount of compensation in eastern China could be considered 'for profit' in the west and send the parents directly to jail," said Zhang.