Five Romanian relatives accused of rolling back odometers in Twin Cities used-car fraud scheme

Five relatives with Romanian ties are accused of an elaborate scheme involving purchasing cars for decreased values by faking mechanical problems and then manipulating odometers and making cosmetic changes to sell the cars for drastically inflated prices.

Ilie Tudor, 27; Ionut Tudor, 29; Florin Tudor, 31; Vasile Tudor, 26; and David Tudor, 22, stand charged with concealing criminal proceeds, theft by swindle and odometer tampering in Hennepin County District Court in connection with the plot that involved purchasing and reselling vehicles on Facebook Marketplace. All five co-defendants are believed to no longer be in Minnesota, and “it appears at least two have left the country.” Warrants have been issued for their arrest. No lawyers are listed as representing them. None has a serious criminal history in the state.

According to charges filed last week, the fraud plot unfolded like this:

This summer, a St. Croix County man listed his Toyota Tundra for sale for $9,000 on Facebook Marketplace. Three people came to Wisconsin to look at the car and took it for a test drive. They told the man the car seemed to have a serious engine leak because there was oil in the radiator. They offered to buy the car for $5,200, and the man agreed.

When the seller of the Tundra looked at video from his home security system, he saw that while one of the buyers distracted him, another had opened the cap to the radiator and poured oil inside.

He then found the truck for sale on Facebook Marketplace. It was easy to distinguish because it had an unusual front bumper and a box drawer system in the bed of the truck. Hennepin County sheriff’s deputies found the truck at a home in north Minneapolis using the vehicle identification number and returned it to the St. Croix County Sheriff’s Office, which noted that the car had 128,343 miles on it.

When the car was originally listed for sale, the odometer read 238,939 miles.

Investigators surveilled the house and conducted background checks on the two men, which uncovered extensive travel history and police contacts across the United States.

In mid-July, officers drove past the home and noticed the same large number of vehicles on the property and a number of people “milling about.” When officers drove past the next day, all of the cars were gone and the house was empty, with the doors and windows left wide open.

Police used city surveillance tools and license plate readers to track the vehicle with Oklahoma license plates to an address in the southeastern corner of downtown Minneapolis, near the interstates 35 and 94 interchange. When they arrived, a number of the cars that had been at the north Minneapolis house were on the property.

Two of the cars were actively listed on Facebook Marketplace, including a Ford F150 that had an odometer reading nearly 100,000 miles lower than the most recent reading law enforcement had recorded in its database.

Detectives surveilled the property for a week and saw people moving a large number of cars onto side streets near the house. “The vehicles appear to be constantly changing,” the criminal complaint read. “Detectives believe these vehicles are being purchased and sold in the same manipulated manner” as the Tundra and other vehicles.

Investigators at the property found six vehicles with altered odometers and four loose odometers that could be swapped into vehicles. They also found a “mileage adjustment tool” and $53,000 in cash. One day later, they interviewed several people at the house and noticed a “small hand” pushing a bag out of an upstairs window. They found it on the roof, and it contained $24,000 in cash.

Vasile Tudor said that he had swapped the entire dashboard of a Ford Transit van because the check engine light had come on and that he also lowered the mileage by 80,000. Florin Tudor said his wife must have been trying to hide the $24,000 when the officers entered the home.

The five charged said they were not regularly employed but they occasionally cleaned homes, mowed yards or begged on street corners for “about $100-$300 a day.” They also allegedly admitted to regularly wiring thousands of dollars to family in Romania, with Florin Tudor saying he had sent $9,000 on “3-5 separate occasions.” He said that money was for his children’s education in Romania.

Investigators alleged that because the transfers were under the mandatory reporting limit of $10,000, the amount of the wires may have been an attempt to evade detection.

Police were ultimately able to match several odometers to their original vehicles and concluded that “cars were being sold for high profits from individuals who were not mechanics, which indicates that odometers were being rolled back and cosmetic fixes were made to the vehicles to get a higher value.”