You’d have to be a special kind of dumb to steal from your own job. It looks like a Canadian car salesman may be just that kind of dumb after he was arrested for using fraud to buy cars from his own dealership.
Shelton Mark Gregouire was a salesman at a dealership in Hamilton, Ontario. An investigation started earlier this year by the Hamilton Police Service’s Financial Crimes Unit uncovered what Gregouire had been up to, according to Carscoops:
Police didn’t exactly spell things out, but it sounds like Gregouire would use stolen identities to take out loans in other people’s names and then ‘buy’ vehicles from the dealership. While specifics are hazy, police said the victims of identity theft were unaware that loans were taken out in their names.
Gregourie used this grift to eventually purchase over $1 million in high end cars from the dealership between November ’23 and March of this year. The cars themselves appear to have been exported out of Canada as police say the cars were re-registered with new VIN numbers. Just one of the cars has been recovered. Gregouire may have had help with his crimes as well as police say more arrests are coming but didn’t give anymore details.
Gregourie himself was arrested in August and is now facing so many charges that he’s likely going away for a long time:
- 14 counts of Fraud Over $5,000
- 4 counts of Fraud Under $5,000
- 23 counts of Identity Theft
- 14 counts of Obtaining Credit by Fraud
- 9 counts of Attempted Credit by Fraud
- 23 counts of Uttering Forged Documents
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this as fraud and car dealerships seem to go hand in hand. Even dealer owners themselves, who are often already rich, have been known to engage in this kind of behavior.