New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a multistate settlement with LexisNexis Risk Solutions and several of its affiliates for defrauding state law enforcement agencies out of more than $2.8 million. LexisNexis deliberately failed to pay those agencies agreed-upon fees for the resale of car crash reports. The press release explains how LN Risk violated its contract for this data:

“LexisNexis defrauded law enforcement agencies in New York and other states by paying law enforcement agencies for only the first crash report sold, and not for each subsequent report resold, as their contracts required. In particular, the investigation found that from June 2012 through May 2019, LexisNexis fulfilled customer crash report requests by searching its database and — if it had previously sold the requested report to another customer — would resell the report without paying the contracted agency its agreed-upon fee for the new sale. LexisNexis would then omit the new sale from reports of sales it was contractually obliged to provide to the agencies. As a result, LexisNexis generated monthly reports for the agencies that falsely understated total crash report sales, and deprived New York State law enforcement agencies of sales fees they were entitled to receive.”