A San Francisco tow company owner has been sentenced to five years in federal prison for orchestrating a scheme to burn competitors’ tow trucks across the Bay Area in 2023, federal prosecutors said.
Jose Vicente Badillo, 29, was sentenced to 60 months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit arson. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California said Badillo devised and directed a plan in 2023 to set fire to rival companies’ tow trucks to drive more business to his own firms, Auto Towing and Specialty Towing, and to retaliate against competitors for perceived wrongs.
According to court documents, Badillo recruited others to carry out the arsons, which targeted six tow trucks owned by four competing companies in April, July and October 2023.
In a separate case, Badillo was sentenced to 27 months in prison for his role in a conspiracy to submit fraudulent auto insurance claims from at least 2017 through at least 2021. Both sentences, handed down on Feb. 13, will run concurrently, federal prosecutors said.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Badillo staged an accident on Guadalupe Canyon Parkway in San Mateo County involving a Sterling tow truck and a vehicle carrier transporting four vehicles as part of the insurance fraud scheme. He also created fake tow records for at least 18 vehicles and orchestrated at least nine additional iterations of the scheme, causing insurance companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.
Badillo was indicted by a federal grand jury in March 2025 in the arson case and pleaded guilty in October 2025. He was twice indicted in 2024 in connection with insurance fraud schemes and, in the second case, pleaded guilty in October 2025 to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud.
Besides prison time, both judges imposed three years of supervised release, to run concurrently, and ordered restitution to be determined at a later hearing.
Badillo is scheduled to begin serving his sentence May 21.