Lewiston car dealer indicted for forgery, theft
The owner of U Turn Auto Sales in Lewiston has been indicted by a grand jury after several customers complained last year that their cars were being repossessed for no reason.
The Maine Department of the Secretary of State announced Friday that Dan Pulkkinen was indicted on 15 counts of aggravated forgery and an aggregated theft charge.
Pulkkinen was indicted after a months-long investigation by the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles, which alleges that he sold customers vehicles that were borrowed from a lender and had outstanding liens on them. The bureau said Pulkkinen hadn’t been paying back the lender for the cars and instead had been using the sales proceeds to pay other bills.
None of the impacted 23 customers were given a title for their respective vehicles.
“It turned out this dealer had borrowed money to buy the vehicles,” Everett Kaherl, a senior detective with the bureau, said in a prepared statement. “The lender put his name on every title and then stopped giving titles back when he stopped getting paid.”
The bureau’s Vehicle Services Division and the Maine Bureau Insurance were able to invoke Pulkkinen’s bond to pay for the release of the titles of each car.
Pulkkinen is scheduled to appear in Androscoggin County Superior Court.
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