Houston Automobile Dealers Association

5 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 4 things and created a very competitive market – not only on MSRP pricing but on used cars, too.” BVM: What is the Dealer Alert system and how did it come about? Schlosser: “Here at the Houston Police Department in the Auto Theft Division, we had a Financial Crimes Unit that was tasked with addressing any economic impact to a vehicle – either through a burglary or a theft. What I quickly learned when I took over this unit in 2018 is that the big area that was being under investigated was the dealership world. Whereas before we would take a burglary of a motor vehicle where a credit card was taken and it would lead to someone spending a couple hundred dollars, and we were chasing a low- value crime, we started focusing exclusively with dealership cases where somebody primarily uses a fake ID to buy a car. “So in 2018, we met with the Houston Automobile Dealers Association and started discussing a vehicle fraud initiative. There was a three-prong attack to this. Number one: the communication between the dealerships and law enforcement was severely lacking, that’s where we came up with the Dealer Alert system. Where that came into play was getting timely information directly to the sources who need to look at it. “When somebody’s using a fraudulent ID out in the dealership network, we want the dealer to be able to identify that ID and contact us. Or if a dealer has had an issue with a fraudulent ID being used, now we capture that information and store it in a database. We have accumulated about 800 fraudulent IDs, at this point – frequently when somebody is using a fake ID they use the same image on multiple IDs. So that Dealer Alert system has been able to open up the road for two-way communication between us.”