Drive-test ‘scam’
A sleazy Brooklyn driving school didn’t care if its non-English-speaking students could read the DMV’s written exam — it had the answers and fed them to the clients using a bizarre cheating device that included a hidden camera and beeper to relay correct answers, authorities said yesterday.
The owners of N&Y Professional Service Line were busted yesterday after they were caught helping an undercover agent posing as a bus-driver wannabe cheat his way to a passing grade on the written exam, the feds said.
The undercover told the instructors he spoke only Mandarin and couldn’t read the test, which is offered only in English and Spanish.
The school — one of whose students was involved in a fatal bus crash last year — issued the agent a varsity-style jacket that had a tiny camera hidden in the right-sleeve snap, according to a federal criminal complaint.
They told him to wear it as he went into a Staten Island DMV office on Feb. 1 to take the commercial driver’s license (CDL) exam for bus drivers, the feds say.
The agent was allegedly told to use the camera to transmit the questions to the owners, who were in a minivan parked nearby.
The owners allegedly signaled the correct answers to the student with a pager — two beeps for answer “A,” four for “B” and six for “C.”
Using this technique, owners Ying Wai Phillip Ng and his wife, Pui Kuen Ng, allegedly helped him get 86 out of 95 questions correct. They charged him $1,800.
“I’ve helped people with the written test for more than 10 years,” Phillip Ng allegedly told the agent.
The Ngs were charged by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents with conspiracy to commit mail fraud because they allegedly planned to send documents related to the license scheme through the mail.
A stunning 720 applicants with connections to the Ngs’ school have gotten licenses since January 2010.
One of them was Kin Yiu Cheung, 37, of Flushing, Queens, who has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter for a May 31, 2011, bus crash on I-95 in Virginia. Four people died and dozens were injured in the crash. The bus was headed from New York to North Carolina.
Cheung, who allegedly nodded off at the wheel, passed his CDL road test on June 14, 2010, while driving a vehicle registered to N&Y.
It was not clear whether he or any of the other applicants had cheated on the test.
“The defendants put the public — passengers, pedestrians and drivers alike — at grave risk in order to line their own pockets,” said Eastern District US Attorney Loretta Lynch.
The Ngs were arraigned yesterday in Brooklyn federal court by Magistrate Judge Roanne Mann. The wife was released on $500,000 bond. Phillip will try to post bail next week.
