It’s a tough world out there, and sometimes money can be tight. If you’re a young couple struggling to get by, where do you turn for a little extra cash?

If you said “selling your children,” you are in a dark place my friend. But that’s exactly what Li Lin and Li Juan of Dongguan did. And they did it to fund their online gaming activity.

ABC News reports out of China that according to Sanxiang City News, the young couple met back in 2007 in an internet cafe. They soon discovered that they both had a pretty strong love for online gaming.

About a year after they met, Li Juan gave birth to a son. According to the reports, days after he was born the couple left him by himself while they traveled over 30 km away to play games at an internet cafe.

It is unclear what particular online games captivated the couple. Possibly an MMORPG? Maybe social gaming? Whatever the games were, they required money, either for a subscription or for in-game micro transactions. Once the couple had their second child, they decided to sell the baby girl for the money to play their games. They received the equivalent of around $500 for her.

When that went smoothly, they decided to sell their firstborn son as well. They raked in a substantially greater amount for him, somewhere around $4600.

They then had another boy, and sold him for about $4600 as well.

Who knows how many more children they would have made and then sold if they weren’t caught? Sure gives more meaning to the phrase “baby factory.”

Li Lin’s mom turned them in when she found out what they were doing.

According to ABC, when asked about their activities, the young Chinese couple replied, “We don’t want to raise them, we just want to sell them for some money.” They also said that they didn’t know they were doing anything illegal.

Now, it wouldn’t be the first time that a story like this out of the East comes to us a little embellished. But it seems to fall in line with other stories we’ve heard recently about strange behavior when it comes to technology.

Last month we told you about a Chinese high-school student that attempted to sell one of his kidneys on the black market in order to acquire the money to purchase an iPad2. A few weeks later, a Chinese girl attempted to sell her virginity through Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. What did she want for it? An iPhone 4.

Those kids had it all wrong. You don’t sell parts of yourself to fuel your technology addiction, you sell your kids. I mean, you can only afford to part with a limited number of vital organs. Technically, you can make around 1.2 kids per year.

Gaming addiction is real, folks. If this doesn’t make that abundantly clear, then I don’t know what does.

[Image Courtesy Lungstruck Flickr Stream]