The owner of Illinois trucking company Freedom Transportation Inc. has been sentenced to three years in jail after being found guilty of a double-brokering fraud.
According to the Office of Inspector General, owner Dragan Simovski would enter into contracts with vendors to ship goods with his company, Freedom Transportation, but would then pass off the load information to a broker that was in on the scheme.
The co-conspirator broker would then find other companies to haul the load, but Simovski would bill the the shipper as if Freedom Transportation hauled the load itself, even though Freedom didn’t own a single truck.
In many instances, the company that actually hauled the load received nothing. The trucking companies that shipped the goods suffered a reported loss of $532,000.
Simovski was sentenced to three years in jail and three years of probation upon his release. He was also order to pay back $532,000 to the trucking companies that were victims to his scam.