All face prison terms if found guilty. Marco Ruiz believes the prosecution of Gary Miller has been salutary, since his general sense is that attorneys are backing off such cases. Other staged-accident investigators agree. But L.A.'s good fortune might be the rest of the country's bad luck. Whatever the word on the street and among police and industry officials, until now the movement of these rings eastward across the U.S. has been unreported.
Some accidents exist only on paper.
Others involve low-speed crashes set up on city streets. Furthermore, McGriff, who tracks claims in a database maintained by the insurance industry, says that some Filipino rings are now apparently shifting operations still further east. Some of the same names he knows from prior claims in Texas and California have started to show up in suspect accident claims filed in Atlanta and Florida. One reason auto-fraud rings break down along ethnic or racial lines is because they spread by word of mouth. The fraud rings need to produce both a high volume of accidents to maximize profits and a constant supply of fresh names to avoid attracting suspicion.