Friday, November 18, 2011

Car Fraud Ring Torn Down


The police officer in the ring was Gary Cottrell. He is a forty-five year old man who had been on the force for fifteen years. As far as police can tell, his job was to chase down accident victims and send them to University Collision. He would get twenty percent of the money for every person that he sent in. Since he was supposed to respond to car accidents anyway, it was easy for him to make sure that the collision center had plenty of work, plenty of unsuspecting victims.
The man who owned University Collision was also involved. His name is Edward Hildebrandt. He had two other collision centers as well, though no fraud has yet been discovered at those businesses. Edward Hildebrandt was working with David Coleman, the man who he had hired to run University Collision. They would give quotes on cars that were much too high. They would then help to submit these to the insurance companies. The people who actually owned the cars did not know how much the repairs were supposed to cost or what the real work entailed, so they had no way to know what was happening. They thought that all of the claims made by these two men were