CHICAGO — A fraudulent double-brokering scheme has earned a former Illinois trucking company owner prison time while forcing him to pay back hundreds of thousand of dollars.

The Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Transportation department announced last week Dragan Simovski, the operator of Freedom Transportation Inc., was sentenced on May 4 in U.S. District Court in Chicago to 36 months incarceration, 36 months supervised release and was ordered to pay U.S.$532,000.

Simovski pleaded guilty on Dec. 12, 2014 to wire fraud in connection with the scheme.

Simovski admitted that he and other individuals were involved in a fraudulent double brokering scheme, where they falsely represented that Freedom Transportation would use its own trucks to transport freight, knowing that Freedom had no trucks.

As part of the scheme, Simovski would enter into contracts with companies on behalf of Freedom, promising to transport freight for those companies, according to the IG’s office, which conducted an investigation with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service

Simovski provided information about the freight loads to a co-conspirator broker knowing that the broker would find other companies to transport and deliver the freight.

He and the co-conspirator agreed that Freedom would bill the customers as if they had kept and performed the jobs, knowing that in many instances, they would not pay the companies that actually did the work. 

The loss to the companies that actually delivered the freight was approximately $532,000, the amount of the restitution.