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CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A program by Toyota Motors to assist loyal customers resulted in fraud, prison time, and a multi-million dollar scheme across two states.
Federal prosecutors in Southern West Virginia resolved the final case in their investigation into the scheme which resulted in millions of dollars scammed from the automaker.
“Over 350 vehicles went through it and over 4.3 million dollars was defrauded from Toyota,” said U.S. Attorney Will Thompson.
The scheme started several years back when Toyota noticed a lot of their Tacoma pickup trucks were developing pre-mature rust. To make amends, Toyota offered to buy back those trucks from each owner for 150 percent of Kelly Blue Book value. It was a tremendous deal, but James Pinson from Wayne County, West Virginia and owner of Big Blue Motor Sales in neighboring Kentucky saw it as an opportunity.
“They decided to buy every Toyota Tacoma pickup truck they could find, a lot of them at auction where they would get them a lot less than the Kelly Blue Book value,” Thompson explained.
From there, the scheme would create paperwork on each pickup truck to make it appear as if it was owned by a private individual. A lot of the individuals who were identified as owners were past customers of Big Blue Motors. Their driver’s licenses and personal information were used to forge the titles of each truck. Most of those past customers, but not all, were unaware of the scheme according to Thompson. Some were offered $100 to allow use of their drivers’ license.
Investigators said Toyota tried to put safeguards in place to keep this sort of thing from happening, but those internal safeguards failed.
“There was a lot of internal control, unfortunately for Toyota there were two people and both were charged and convicted, who were part of the internal controls and were part of the scheme. They were getting cash bribes to make this stuff go through,” Thompson explained on MetroNews Talkline.
Federal prosecutors were alerted to the scheme by people on the inside.
“Greed is one of the mortal sins and they got too greedy. Some internal people reached out to federal agencies and that’s how we uncovered this,” he said.
The biggest beneficiary of the plan was Pinson according to Thompson. Pinson was convicted in December and sentenced to six years in federal prison. Four people ended up convicted and will share in the repayment of the money. Thompson said they have seized a beach house Pinson owned and it will be sold to help defray the cost.
Thompson said to his knowledge it was the only place in America where the scheme had been executed.