Four people have been arrested and 14 charges have been laid in a fraud scheme in which more than 160 fictitious driver's licences were issued. Police said that other false identities — as many as 300 — were also created since June, 2008, and used to gain mortgages, auto loans and credit cards as well as other provincial and federal identification. Police launched the investigation in June after a bank clerk reported that a client was carrying out multiple transactions using different names.
The fake identification was traced to two female Ontario DriveTest employees in Orangeville. Two male non-employees would send people seeking false identification to the Orangeville office, for which they would charge a hefty fee.
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Each identity has an estimated street value of $5,000, police say. Michael Kelly said one individual was found to have nine driver's licences with different names. It's alleged that some of the IDs were used to bypass government regulations such as the Family Responsibility Act, while others were used to skirt court orders stemming from impaired driving charges. 'We have just touched the tip of the iceberg,' Kelly said.
'This case goes a long way back and spreads quite wide.' Deborah Chamberlain, 45, of Toronto, Joanne Mcglennon, 43, of Orangeville and Malvinder Birdi, 45, of Brampton are facing several charges including fraud over $5, 000, and forgery. Mohammad Akmal, 31 of Toronto has been charged with fraud under $5, 000 and possession of property obtained by crime.
A team of about 15 civil servants has been working on the project since 2004, alongside dozens of officials from the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC). The IBC, which is partly funded by insured drivers in Ontario, will only say they have spent “substantial” funds on the technology project. Despite their investments, the ministry and the IBC still can't do what Texas and 30 other states have already done — give police on-the-road electronic access to a database of insured drivers. “This problem has been allowed to go on,” says Brian Patterson, president of the Ontario Safety League. “We're already paying the ministry to fix this problem (in licensing fees and in insurance premiums). They're not working hard enough to address it.”. Without an electronic system to verify a driver's insurance slips, uninsured drivers are able to take to our streets with relative impunity while fraud artists are able to continue selling fake car insurance policies that cannot easily be spotted by police.
Hugh Smith of the Toronto Police Service's traffic division says money shouldn't be an issue when it comes to giving police the tools they need. “I should have access to check immediately that your insurance is valid when you're stopped or when you're involved in a collision,” Smith says. Dave Woodford of the Ontario Provincial Police's highway safety division says, “We've been asking for a long time for a system where we can check.” Roughly 2,100 uninsured vehicles are involved in collisions on Ontario roads every year. Some of those collisions are fatal.
All are costly. But it's not the uninsured drivers who pick up the more than $125 million in annual damages caused by those accidents. It's Ontario's 9 million licensed drivers who pay through licensing fees and increased insurance premiums. Driving without insurance is illegal; a minimum $5,000 fine on conviction is the penalty. Under Ontario's current system, car owners must provide an insurance policy number to the transportation ministry when renewing their licence plate. But the ministry — in person, online or at a provincial kiosk — currently has no way to verify the insurance. “If you were to write in that application form that the name of the insurance company is Bozo the Clown Insurance and the policy number is 1234, you would have your licence plate issued because nothing is done with that information,” says Frank Klees, a former transportation minister and the Conservative transport critic.
The ministry's new system will fix that problem, giving the ministry the ability to verify your insurance. But only on the day the sticker is issued. The police will still be left dealing with those pink insurance slips you carry around in your wallet or glove box that are less official than a Blockbuster video card. They aren't machine readable, can be easily falsified, and are often invalid well before the stated expiration date. “There's no reason why (the new system) can't be made available to police,” says Klees. One of the most vocal advocates for police having access to an electronic insurance database is Debbie Virgoe, whose husband died in an accident involving a man driving with falsified insurance slips.
On June 18, 2007, Nauman Nusrat and two other men were street racing on Highway 400. Nusrat, 19, and driving a dark blue Pontiac Grand Am at 180 km/h, cut off the transport truck David Virgoe was driving. Virgoe's truck hit a guard rail, flipped over and landed on its roof in a nearby ditch. The 48-year-old truck driver died instantly. “The driver that hit my husband was uninsured and the police didn't know that he was uninsured at the scene because he provided forged documents,” says Virgoe's widow. “If you can't follow the simple rules and we can't check them, why are the rules there?
Main Banungi Miss India Serial Title Song. You and I might as well drive without insurance.” Nusrat pleaded guilty to criminal negligence causing death, driving without insurance and having forged insurance documents. He was sentenced to two years of house arrest — on top of the 11 months he had already spent in jail — along with a lifetime driving prohibition. In 2008, the Star's sister paper, The Record of Waterloo Region, raised the issue of the delayed provincial insurance project.
At the time, Paul Harbottle, director of the Uninsured Vehicle Project, said his team's progress was being slowed by numerous erroneously transcribed vehicle registration numbers which had been incorrectly transcribed into the province's current system. As a result, a number of drivers would have had their validation stickers denied had Harbottle's team launched the new program too soon. “We have come a long with this,” Harbottle now says.
“A lot of people don't realize the time or risk or complexity that it takes to do these kind of things. We want to ensure people aren't wrongfully denied insurance.” In 2002, the ministry estimated that up to 6 per cent of the more than 7.48 million motor vehicles on Ontario's roads were uninsured. They won't give an estimate anymore, but they will say this: there are nearly 14 million roadworthy private passenger vehicles (cars, pickup trucks, vans, SUVs, dune buggies and motor homes) registered in the ministry's database. Roughly 6. Spotify Mp3 Downloader Chrome Extension. 5 million of them have insurance.
The rest do not and it is unclear how many of the cars without insurance are on the road. An analysis of the most recent provincial collision data available (2002-2006) reveals uninsured drivers were involved in 10,671 accidents in the first five years after the province vowed its crackdown. Some 108 people were killed in those collisions.
A further 3,717 people were injured. Uninsured motorists cost the province's 9 million drivers roughly $27 million a year in licensing fees and a further $100 million in insurance premiums.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada says the average insured car owner pays $15.48 a year to cover the potential damages caused by uninsured drivers. That rate has increased by 26 per cent from $11.38 in 2002.
But Ontario drivers don't just pay for the uninsured in their premiums. Whenever a driver renews his licence in the province, $15 of the $75 licensing fee goes into the Motor Vehicle Accident Claims (MVAC) Fund, which acts as the “payer of last resort” to people who are injured in car accidents but have no access to insurance. Thanks to that fund, pedestrians and cyclists hit by an uninsured or unidentified driver are eligible for up to $200,000 and up to $2 million for medical and attendant-care benefits if they suffer catastrophic injuries. But so too are the uninsured drivers, even if they were at fault in the collision.
And uninsured drivers don't always have to pay for damages they inflict. That's what happened in a Toronto accident in June 2005.
Petal Seetal walked out the door of her Driftwood Ave. Home en route to her high school to check out her final grades for the school year. She had already taken a few steps into the intersection of Jane St. And Driftwood Ave.
When Oswald Quiroz Jr., a teenaged driver in his father's uninsured Honda Civic, ran a red light and took Seetal's legs out from under her. Seetal was left clinging to the hood of Quiroz's car as he barrelled out of control through the intersection, smashing into a parked taxicab and throwing the teenaged girl to the ground. Quiroz was subsequently convicted of dangerous driving causing bodily harm. Seetal, who had no insurance of her own, was left with a fractured pelvis and a head injury that resulted in anxiety, depression, chronic headaches and rehabilitation bills that included an occupational and speech-language therapist. Though he was at fault in the accident, Quiroz did not have to pay for any of the $200,000 needed for Seetal's rehabilitation. In the end, it was the insurer of the idle taxicab that paid up. According to data obtained and analyzed by the Star, the MVAC Fund processed 22,808 successful claims for a total of $53,861,542.62 between Jan.
1, 2005, and Dec. Of the millions spent, $16,716,226.40 went directly tothe uninsured drivers themselves, covering lost income and rehabilitation and medical expenses. The rest went tocovering the recovery of pedestrians injured by uninsured motorists or to passengers injured in the uninsured motorists' car. Eleanor McMahon has been advocating for tougher laws on uninsured drivers since June 6, 2006. That was the day her husband, Greg Stobbart, an off-duty OPP officer riding his bike on a country road in Milton, was struck and killed by Michael Dougan. Though Dougan had insurance at the time of that accident, he had five previous convictions for driving while suspended and four for driving without insurance. “The penalties are not applied enough to be a deterrent,” says McMahon.
McMahon has been instrumental in pushing for Greg's Law — named for her late husband — which would impose a seven-day vehicle seizure if someone is caught driving while under suspension. She says the same penalties should be applied to anyone found to be driving without insurance. “When you have a loved one whose life is lost at the hands of someone who has had the selfishness and lack of discretion (not) to comply with what's required in a civil society it really causes you to sit down and think, ‘Well what can we do about that?'