Feds Charge Fraud Temp Tag Dealers ID’d in Streetsblog’s ‘Ghost Plate’ Series
Streetsblog got action.
Eleven fraudulent car dealers — including several who were identified in Streetsblog’s award-winning April 2023 investigation into the black market for fake temporary tags — sold more than 100,000 phony plates, robbing taxpayers of about $15 million and turning those vehicles into “ghost cars” that were involved in at least six homicides and thousands of other offenses, federal prosecutors said in indictments unsealed on Wednesday.
The fake tags were sold, as Streetsblog reported, through companies set up in Georgia and New Jersey thanks to lax rules in those states.
One man from both the indictment and the Streetsblog series, Felix De Jesus Jimenez, operated his dealership out of a notorious compound in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Despite no visible inventory of cars, nor any sales people working at the location, Jimenez sold more than 36,000 tags in 2021 — which, if true, would have been more than used-car juggernauts Carvana and CarMax … combined.
The only way to legitimately obtain a temporary tag is to buy a car from a licensed dealership; Jimenez was licensed by New Jersey, but if he was truly selling cars, he would have had to move 98 vehicles every day of the year — an impossibility given the dealership location and inventory:
Jeffrey Herrera, also first identified by Streetsblog, is a Yonkers resident who ran a fraudulent Georgia dealership that issued more than 20,000 temp tags in 2023, the most in the Peachtree State that year, authorities said.
Streetsblog found dozens of fake Georgia plates in the Bronx in 2023 after identifying the area from one of the dealership’s Instagram posts.
The 10 companies identified by federal prosecutors in the indictments are a small fraction of the hundreds of New Jersey and Georgia dealerships that Streetsblog found had issued as many as 200,000 fake temp tags during the height of the pandemic, when fake plates became common on New York City streets.
After that series was published, Georgia and New Jersey cracked down on rogue dealers, including the 10 involved in the indictments.
New Jersey had only issued Jimenez’s company a $500 fine — a small penalty given the hundreds of thousands of dollars in ill-gotten gains he raked in. Georgia cited Herrera’s company after identifying over 14,000 seemingly fraudulent tags.
But by going after the sellers themselves, the feds have upped the ante: If convicted, the sellers themselves could each face up to 75 years in prison.
“The defendants allegedly spent years scheming to avoid tolls and tickets,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement announcing the indictments. “Their bill has now come due.”
Prosecutors laid out the scam in details that will be familiar to Streetsblog readers: The sellers charged between $50 and $250 for fake tags, allowing drivers to turn their vehicles into “ghost cars” hard to identify after violent crashes or other crimes.
“These individuals allegedly turned temporary tags into tools for evading accountability,” said James Barnacle, the head of the FBI’s New York field office.
They also help drivers avoid camera-issued tickets for speeding or for running red lights — seemingly a large portion of the $11.8 million that the city lost in the scheme, according to federal prosecutors. The tags also help drivers avoid tolls and car registration costs — presumably the bulk of the $3.1 million lost to state taxpayers.
One dealer identified by prosecutors, Ramon Eligio Dejesus Peralta, made “millions of dollars” along with unidentified co-conspirators through two companies.
Peralta registered a dealership called Havich Auto in New Jersey in 2019 that issued 8,602 temp tags in a single year — which would be 23 cars sold every day. The New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, the state’s DMV, suspended the dealership in 2020, and Peralta paid a small fine.
But Peralta was back at it two years later, opening a new dealership in Georgia named Ramon Auto. That dealership issued around 7,100 temp tags over just 11 months, prosecutors said.
Georgia officials starting flagging around 400 tags into the dealership’s operations that contained potentially fraudulent information within months of the dealership’s opening.
Prosecutors said that the temp tags sold by the 11 individuals charged in the indictments were the subject of numerous complaints and were involved in 1,200 incidents — including six homicides.
Prosecutors declined to clarify the connection between the ghost tags and the incidents that warranted a police response.
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