Load-Board Scammer Gets 10-Year Sentence and Must Repay $443,000 to Fleets, Brokers

Kulwant Singh Gill has been sentenced to nearly 11 years in federal prison for defrauding dozens of motor carriers and brokers out of nearly $500,000.

Gill, 53, who was originally named in a federal indictment in 2006 for a series of northern-California-based load-board double-brokering scams, received the sentence last month after he pleaded guilty to two indictments in 2009 that included continuing fraud schemes in 2007 while free on $200,000 bond.

This is believed to be the longest prison sentence ever imposed for a freight load-board scammer. Last year, a California scammer was sentenced to four years in prison and his two sons to five years for defrauding 165 people of more than $1 million.

Although his indictments date back nearly six years, Gill has been able to avoid being sent to prison due to unspecified “myriad medical conditions,” court records said.

“Rather than ceasing his criminal activity after his indictment in 2006, the defendant reopened his company under another name and continued to defraud victims while on pretrial release and while suffering the same medical conditions that purportedly make him unable to endure a lengthy prison sentence,” according to a 2008 federal indictment.

Gill operated his load-board scam for an estimated five years before a U.S. Department of Transportation Inspector General’s Office special agent caught up with him in 2006, according to court documents. At that time, Gill already had a record that included convictions for felony check fraud and false insurance claims, said the agent’s affidavit.

“The defendant’s record shows that he is a serial fraudster whose previous contacts with the justice system have been insufficient to promote respect for the law or to deter further criminal activity,” the 2008 indictment said.

In addition to the 10-year, 10-month sentence, a federal judge also ordered Gill to pay $443,000 in restitution to his victims.

Doug Moscrip, co-owner of the load board Internet Truckstop, said Gill’s activities were largely the reason he began beefing up his own website’s security.

At the time Gill committed his frauds, Moscrip was issuing numerous alerts to truckers and brokers warning them of his activities.

“He was one of the ones that really got us into security,” Moscrip told Transport Topics. “For a long time we had difficulty getting law enforcement interested in him.”

Internet Truckstop now has four employees who handle security for the website and requires a company with an account to pay in advance for freight loads, he said.

“Before that, we would just bill them,” Moscrip said. “That made it easier for crooks, because we’d sometimes go 60 days before we’d collect.”

Gill made a handsome profit in the scams he pulled off, primarily looting motor carriers and brokers who failed to perform their due diligence checking his credential and background, according to court records.

“The investigator out of San Francisco who went after him was just amazed at what he got away with,” Moscrip said.

Indeed, Gill pioneered many of the techniques that were later copied by other load-board thieves, Moscrip said.

At the time, Gill capitalized on a vulnerability of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s carrier registration website, logging into legitimate motor carrier number listings but changing the phone numbers and addresses.

“The way the FMCSA’s website was set up at the time, it was pretty simple to do,” Moscrip said. FMCSA said that since then, the website security has been improved.

Gill’s overhead was relatively low. He’d rent an apartment, set up a computer and fax machine, and use a prepaid cell phone to do business. Sometimes he’d rent a mailbox and use it as a business address.

Using several different aliases, Gill would contract for a freight load with a shipper or broker using a legitimate or fake company name, get a payment for fuel in advance, relist the shipment on a load board, but never pay the trucker who actually picked it up and made the delivery.

Ken Lowry, owner of now-defunct Desert Jewell Logistics Inc., a small carrier based in Glendale, Ariz., was one of dozens of unsuspecting truckers who hauled loads for Gill — but never got paid.

Lowry’s small trucking company was cheated out of $6,700 to pick up a load for Gill in San Pedro, Calif.

“I’ve been taken six or seven times since then,” Lowry said. I wasn’t as careful as I should have been. I never got a dime of it back.”