MILWAUKEE - You paid for it: tens of billions of dollars every year to cover the costs of other people's crimes.

Federal investigators call it the perfect storm: a sinking economy, soaring gas prices and fire-bugs with too much debt.

Can't afford the note on your fancy new car? Just torch it for the insurance money.

It's how more and more people in Wisconsin try to get out from under their sky-high monthly payments.

Over the last couple years, high gas prices and a lousy economy have turned average people into arsonists and thieves: light up a car, report it stolen, then file an insurance claim.

Laurence Burzynski is a special agent with the National Insurance Crime Bureau. He's the guy police departments in Wisconsin call to trace bombed-out cars they suspect the owner may have lit up on purpose. He used to get about three to four calls a year.

"Now I’m getting about three to five calls a week with fire burned vehicles," Burzynski said in a recent interview.

The TODAY’S TMJ4 I-Team caught up with Burzynski at the Milwaukee tow lot on the city's south side as he poured over a couple nearly brand new, high-end SUVs hauled in within the last week. He showed us a basically brand new Infiniti SUV which was worth about $50,000 until Milwaukee police found it dumped and burned.

We also saw a heap of charred metal which was once a $40,000 Chevy Tahoe SUV.

"For metal to get the point where it falls apart, you have to be to the point where there's an accelerant, or gasoline, or flammable mixture actually thrown on the vehicle," Burzunski explained. "Someone didn't want this vehicle."

Had the Tahoe or the Infiniti been stolen for parts, then set on fire, you'd expect to find it stripped - no engine or transmission, no rims or radio, but the trucks, while burned up, weren't missing any parts.

"This just seems unnatural to me," said Burzynski.

Even less natural, in each vehicle Burzynski examined, the interior had been burned up, too.

"Cars are not designed to burn anymore," Burzynski said. "Take the heat source away, it will stop, so something had to be used to burn the vehicle."

Insurance fraud experts, like UW-Milwaukee professor James Brown, figure insurance companies end up shelling out $60 to $80 billion a year for bogus claims. Brown says consumers should be outraged, because the insurance companies don't eat the loss. Instead, they jack up everyone's rates.

"It all gets passed back to the customer," said Brown.

Last year, the NICB found auto theft reports went down by 2 percent, but in Wisconsin they went up by 12 percent, fourth highest in the U.S. Of those cars that got recovered, nearly half were found burned and eventually linked to a questionable insurance claim.

When asked how to stop all this, Burzunski said simply, "stronger enforcement."

However, it's much easier for an insurance company to deny a claim then it is for a prosecutor to make a winnable case.

"If people's attitudes towards this kind of, what we call, soft fraud are different than strong armed robbery, it's still theft. It's still robbery one way or the other," Brown said.

The NICB also reports an increase in the number of high end cars recovered from the bottom of lakes and rivers that, odds are, got help getting there.