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Jan 1, 2004 12:00 PM

A federal grand jury has indicted 41 people for allegedly buying and selling fraudulent Utah commercial driver licenses.

More than 35 drivers who obtained the bogus licenses have been arrested, and other arrests are pending.

Of the 41 indicted persons, three face multiple federal counts of making a false certificate of driver competency and forging the certification documents that allowed the others to obtain the licenses.

The other defendants — the drivers — each were charged with a single count of using a Social Security number belonging to others when obtaining the CDLs.

The scheme was discovered more than a year ago during a state audit of third-party testers, Department of Public Safety Commissioner Robert Flowers said. The audit showed an unusually large number of licenses issued by certain testers, and upon closer examination, the fraud was uncovered.

In a related story, investigators in Pennsylvania are looking into a crash this past summer in which a Utah truck driver who received his CDL at one of the third-party testers killed a North Carolina family traveling north of Pittsburgh PA. Investigators have not yet determined if he obtained the license illegally.