Four arrests were announced in early September in connection with an alleged yearslong vehicle title-document scheme involving a former Webb County tax office employee who later became a Bexar County sheriff’s deputy and two members of her family.

The allegation boiled down to one basic idea: Vehicle records had been tampered with to reduce the amount of sales tax owed, with thousands of dollars that should have gone to the state allegedly ending up with the suspects instead.

In a probable-cause statement obtained by the Laredo Morning Times, investigators outline how the alleged scheme worked.

The 16-page document details suspicious transactions processed by then-Webb County Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office employee Anabell Rivera, as well as later transactions involving private title-service businesses, a used-car dealership and customers with little or no knowledge of the vehicle registration process.

At its core, the alleged scheme involved recording legitimate vehicle purchases as gifts, allowing the transactions to be taxed at a much lower rate than if they had been recorded as sales.

The investigation culminated in the arrests of Anabell Rivera, 26; Nora Alicia Rivera, 62; Reyna Estefania Trevino, 40; and Abelardo Rivera III, 22. All four are charged with tampering with a governmental record, a second-degree felony.

Anabell Rivera and Abelardo Rivera are siblings, while Nora Rivera is their mother. Court records do not specify any relationship between them and Trevino beyond the alleged scheme.

Inside the tax office

A Texas Department of Motor Vehicles investigator reviewed more than 13,000 transactions processed under Anabell Rivera’s employee identification number between June 2021 and February 2023.

The transactions fell into three categories that did not follow established procedures or state law: transactions involving the state’s sales-tax threshold, transactions in which no fee was collected and transactions that had been manually modified.

Seven transactions were highlighted for further review. Across those seven transactions, about $200 in sales tax was collected when more than $4,000 should have been, resulting in an estimated loss to the state of about $3,800.

In one case, tampering with a vehicle’s presumptive value led to more than $2,500 in losses. Beyond the losses to the state, the alleged tampering also affected vehicle owners whose registrations were later rejected, leaving them with losses of their own.

No-fee transactions made up another category.

Between July and December 2022, Anabell Rivera was allegedly responsible for more than 100 no-fee transactions, accounting for about 20% of the no-fee transactions in Webb County during the period examined. By comparison, other employees each accounted for about 4%. In 14 sampled transactions, Anabell Rivera should have charged fees.

Another category involved manual override transactions.

Close to 200 manual override transactions involving Texas Motor Vehicle Inspection Reports were identified, and nearly half contained inspection dates that differed from the dates on record.

The gift scheme

The investigation also uncovered transactions in which vehicles were transferred using gift affidavits instead of being presented as purchases — a practice that became central to the case as it expanded beyond Anabell Rivera’s work at the county tax office into the title-service business.

According to court records, two title-service operations were connected to the fraudulent transactions — one operated by Trevino and the other by the three Riveras. The businesses handled vehicle transfers and registration for customers with little or no knowledge of the vehicle registration process.

One complainant’s account illustrates how the alleged scheme operated. The title-service company agreed to handle the title and registration paperwork for a “service fee” of about $1,300. The vehicle purchase was then presented to the county as a gift, allowing just $10 in sales tax to be paid to the state while the company allegedly kept most of the fee paid by the customer.

One such transaction occurred in February 2023, about a month before Anabell Rivera resigned from the county tax office, in which a gift affidavit for a vehicle was notarized by Trevino, a notary public who operated a used-vehicle dealership in Laredo.

For that vehicle, a 2021 Chevrolet Silverado, the state collected about $40 in sales tax. The title application also listed the vehicle’s mileage at 40,000 miles, while the odometer showed less than 9,000 miles — a discrepancy of more than 31,000 miles.

Court records describe two more customers who reported similar experiences.

A customer who paid Trevino $1,250 in April to obtain license plates and register a vehicle later told investigators he disputed signing the gift affidavit and other paperwork associated with the transaction. Another person listed on the documents likewise denied signing them, and the customer never received the vehicle’s title.

A month later, another customer complained to the county tax office after not receiving his registration documents. He told investigators he had paid $14,000 for the vehicle and another $1,300 to register it, then disputed the signature on the paperwork. He also said he believed the other person listed on the gift affidavit never went to the title-service business to sign anything.

Five years later

Across the cases cited in court records, the playbook remained the same: the company received a “service fee” to handle the vehicle’s registration paperwork, presented the transaction to the county as a gift instead of as a sale, then pocketed the fee — its profit — while the state lost taxes that otherwise would have been collected, often leaving customers with inaccurate or missing paperwork.

What began as an internal review of vehicle transactions at the Webb County Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office grew into a broader interagency investigation involving the Texas Rangers and the Laredo Police Department’s Auto Theft Task Force.

More than five years after those first tampered transactions, the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office took one of its own — Anabell Rivera — into custody Sept. 1 while she was off duty on a warrant secured in Webb County days earlier. She was released the following morning after posting a $30,000 bond and resigned from her position as a sheriff’s deputy in lieu of termination following her arrest.

Two days later, Nora Rivera, Abelardo Rivera and Trevino were taken into custody at LPD headquarters and later released after each posted a $30,000 bond.

While the probable-cause statement provides a detailed look at how the alleged scheme operated, it does not establish how many vehicle transactions were processed using the alleged gift-transfer method, how much sales tax revenue the state may have lost as a result or how the businesses came to serve customers with little or no knowledge of the vehicle registration process.