18 arrested in massive car insurance fraud scheme

SAN MARTIN >> A pair of San Martin brothers spearheaded a scheme where nearly two dozen people staged car crashes to cash in on more than $200,000 in phony insurance claims, authorities said.

The brothers, 36-year-old Angel Topete and 34-yearold Joshua Topete, were among 18 people — mostly Santa Clara County residents — arrested over the past month in connection with 18 “staged collisions” reported over a three-year stretch, according to the state Department of Insurance and Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office.

Four suspects are still being sought, but all 22 have been charged. One of the defendants charged in the case, Gerardo Ivan Espinosa Martinez, 31, was already being prosecuted in a separate insurance fraud case involving 15 other allegedly staged collisions.

“This large ring of family and friends allegedly conspired to defraud insurers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said in a statement. “The cost of insurance fraud is shouldered by consumers who pay higher premiums when insurers pass along their losses. Working with our task force partners is critical in combating the multi-billion dollar problem of insurance fraud.”

Investigators with the Silicon Valley Automobile Insurance Fraud Task Force opened a case in 2015 and eventually determined that the Topete brothers masterminded a scheme in which their family, friends and other associates filed fraudulent claims with six insurers “for collisions that were either staged or never occurred at all,” authorities said.

The task force, made up of personnel from the Department of Insurance, the District Attorney’s Office and California Highway Patrol, contends that the defendants took new policies under multiple names and then intentionally crashed their cars into each other. Some of the cars involved were salvaged vehicles.

The subsequent fraudulent claims they filed, declaring the total loss of a vehicle, netted a total of $210,000, authorities said.

The District Attorney’s Office said in a news release that the collisions were “often reported as caused by a distracted driver striking parked vehicles,” and were reported between 2012 and 2015.

The highest single claim was for $37,723, prosecutors said. Two San Jose auto-body shops, Espinosa Body Shop and Auto Parts USA, were implicated.

It was the involvement of the Espinosa Body Shop that appears to have broken open the most recent fraud case: A Farmers Insurance investigators noticed that damage on one of the cars did not match a corresponding claim, and remembered that the shop was already accused of fraud.