by Cris Italia
Queens District Attorney Richard Brown announced the arrests of 30 individuals after a sting that resulted in the recovery of 68 reportedly stolen vehicles. The two locals allegedly gave up their vehicles to middlemen so they could claim insurance money.
Louisa Gangidino, 29, of Riverside Drive in Oceanside and Scott Wallace, 30, of Emerson Avenue in Baldwin were charged with insurance fraud for their part in this auto scam. According to the charges, the owners turned over their vehicles to middlemen to get rid of them, filed insurance claims falsely reporting their vehicles stolen and received settlements of up to $32,000. The middlemen then took the cars and sold the vehicles to undercover detectives posing as junkyard dealers for $1,500.
In recent years we have seen an alarming increase in automobile insurance fraud in the New York metropolitan area indeed, throughout the state and across the country, Brown said. The cost of automobile insurance fraud is enormous, estimated by the insurance industry at $23 billion nationwide each year, and is ultimately passed on to the consumer by way of ever increasing insurance premiums.
The case began 1999 and, as the undercover investigation was conducted, more and more individuals became involved. The New York Police Department Auto Crime Division set up an undercover automobile buy-back operation on a street corner in Queens Village, using detectives posing as junkyard dealers. The detectives had pockets full of marked money, a pager and a cell phone.
The defendants believed that they could beat the system, but they could not have been more mistaken. Instead of pocketing
