VIDEO: Crooked valet attendants caught in Los Angeles

It's tough to find a parking spot in Los Angeles, but luckily there are plenty of valets to park your ride for you. The cost ranges from just a few bucks to $20 or more, but when there are places to go, people to see and deadlines to meet, the cost of parking is often better than spending the better part of your afternoon looking for a spot yourself. The problem is, more and more locations have been designated as loading zones and the public parking spaces have been shrinking. The interesting part about this is that the city of Los Angeles itself hasn't been adding the zones – but a bunch of unscrupulous valets have been.

NBC Los Angeles spent a year digging up dirt, and the investigative reporting of the network's Ana Garcia found valets who got into accidents with cars, shuttled co-workers to other spots in customer cars and put up cones and signs illegally. The local NBC affiliate also had cameras rolling as valets parked in front of expired meters, received tickets and didn't tell the car owners. In all, NBC LA and the city's Department of Transportation found over 80 fraudulent loading zone signs, and even after some of the signs were removed, they were back up the next night.

Hit the jump to watch the seven minute video. The investigative journalism is excellent, and the expressions on the faces of the valet workers as they are caught up in lie after lie are priceless. The only bummer is that NBC LA didn't put some cameras in the cars to see if the valets swiped things from people's cars.

[Source: NBC Los Angeles via Consumerist]

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