By Paul Ertelt

Capitol Bureau

ALBANY - The state has shifted its focus in the battle against auto-insurance fraud, expanding enforcement efforts begun in New York City to the rest of the state.

Over the past three months, an anti-fraud effort by the state Insurance Department and the attorney general's office has nabbed 25 people upstate, including an Otsego County man.

"The problem of auto-insurance fraud is not just limited to New York City," Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said Monday. "It is a problem that is spreading across the entirety of New York state."

Fraud is one of the main reasons New Yorkers pay exorbitant auto insurance premiums, adding $150 to $300 a year to individual premiums, said state Insurance Superintendent Greg Serio.

"Auto-insurance fraud costs every one of us money every day," Serio said. "We win the fight on fraud, and we win the fight on rates."

In May 2000, Gov. George Pataki issued an executive order naming the attorney general as a special prosecutor in auto-insurance fraud cases. That gave his office the authority to tackle cases that local district attorneys often don't have the resources to pursue, Spitzer said.

In November 2001, Spitzer created the Automobile Insurance Fraud Unit, which so far has brought felony charges against 154 people.

The AIFU, with a staff of 48, initially focused its efforts on prosecuting cases in the metropolitan New York area, where organized crime and staged accidents were major elements of the crime.

Investigators began to battle auto-insurance fraud as they would other organized crime, employing wiretaps and surveillance, Spitzer said. Once the AIFU was established and had a few prosecutions under its belt, the attorney general and the Insurance Department decided it was time to focus on upstate.

The fraud unit is prosecuting the case of Choice Torre of Morris, who was arrested Nov. 26 and charged with fraud, larceny and other crimes. He allegedly filed a false report claiming that a camera, a computer and other property were stolen from his car.

Torre told Yonkers police that $2,000 worth of property was stolen from his car while he was visiting that city, according to the attorney general's office. Torres later filed a $4,700 claim with his insurance carrier.

The insurance carrier considered his story suspicious and referred it to the Insurance Department, said Sean Ralph, supervising investigator at the department's Oneonta office.

"The whole story that he gave ... just didn't make a lot of sense," he said, but he declined to discuss the case in detail.

Torre is free on his own recognizance.

So far, investigators have found little evidence in the rest of the state of the kind of organized auto-fraud rings that have plagued New York City.

But tougher enforcement will help deter fraud rings from setting up shop upstate, said Charles Bardong, director of the Insurance Department's Insurance Fraud Bureau.