NYC ‘bounty hunters’ who make hundreds of thousands of dollars reporting idling trucks are lawyers, doctors and residents of leafy city streets

The street snitches who have raked in up to nearly $1 million apiece reporting idling trucks to the city are lawyers, doctors and residents of posh enclaves — enjoying the lucrative perks of a program that targeted even mobile COVID testing trucks during the pandemic.

Among the people profiting the most off the Big Apple’s Citizen Idling Complaint Program is Patrick Schnell, who records show has made $582,800 since 2019 by filming trucks idling for more than 3 minutes, then sending his clips to the city and collecting checks worth up to 50% of the vehicles’ ensuing fines.

But it’s just a side hustle for Schnell, who lives in leafy Boerum Hill, Brooklyn — and is a pediatrician with a long resume from high-powered medical groups such as Pfizer.

As part of his street-reporting schtick, Schnell appears to have an X account where he posts footage of cars and drivers who have obscured their license plates or parked illegally.

Schnell’s estimated half-million take from the complaint program only places him at the bottom of its top-five earners.

He protested to The Post on Sunday that the amount of money the city says it has shelled out to him “is not the money I have received,” before adding, “It’s hard work.”

Manhattan resident Ernest Welde has meanwhile brought home a staggering $895,737 under the program since 2019 — more than $100,000 per year — while working as an environmental lawyer by day and living on a hip East Village street near Tompkins Square Park.

He apparently even has two apartments, with neighbors telling The Post he rents out a co-op unit and stays at his second home down the street. He was not able to be reached by phone for comment.

Another top earner was Michael Streeter — with $709,975 in bounties under his belt — who lives on a leafy and secluded Brooklyn Heights street with views of the East River.

“Michael is awesome,” said neighbor Nick Burkett-Caudell, who called Streeter a hard-working “sweetheart” and fully supports his idling complaints.

“What Michael does is great for the neighborhood in Brooklyn,” Burkett-Caudel said. “It does a lot for keeping the traffic moving, reducing congestion, and reducing the pollution that comes out of these trucks that are just idling for, who knows, 20 minutes, half an hour, when they could be shut off.

“He’s been doing this for years,” the neighbor added. “So if he’s making that kind of money doing work that benefits us all, all the best to him.”

Streeter also was unable to be reached by phone.

Schnell told The Post that the street idling vigilantes closed ranks in their collective WhatsApp chat and decided as a group not to comment when reached by The Post.

Other top city earners have been Lower Easter Siders Wanfang Wu and Ephraim Rosenbaum, who have made $748,825 and $725,025, respectively.

“I don’t complain,” a neighbor of Rosenbaum’s told The Post, shrugging at the local idling trucks. “I don’t understand why he would.”

Several of the top earners appeared in a “Daily Show” segment last year — with Streeter estimating that about “20 to 30” people are “submitting the bulk of the complaints.”

Idling for longer than 3 minutes has been illegal in the Big Apple since the 1980s, with the paid snitches and environmentalists arguing that the exhaust from vehicles pollutes the air and causes health issues for everyone.

But it wasn’t until 2019 that the law began to be taken seriously, with the Department of Environmental Protection rolling out the citizen program. Participation has increased drastically since then, with 124,000 complaints being submitting in 2024 — up from 49,000 in 2022.

“I submit as many idling complaints as I can,” Streeter said in a March City Council meeting. “My participation has made a direct and noticeable impact in my neighborhood.”

But one of the top companies that anti-idlers apparently targeted in recent years was LabQ Clinical Diagnostics LLC, which operated many of the mobile COVID-19 testing units that filled New York’s streets as the Big Apple was clawing its way out of the pandemic.

The company wracked up 3,288 violations between 2019 and 2023 — placing it at the top of the scofflaw list at the time and suggesting the anti-idlers had a field day reaping cash rewards from tattling on them. LabQ has since fallen from the top of the leaderboard and been replaced by ConEd’s 22,898 violations, Verizon’s 13,544, and Amazon’s 10,949, city records show.

Some critics of the citizen reporting program said the idling situation is often not so simple as the resident enforcers think — and that vital city services that New York depends on are suffering because of it.

Idling engines are often used to charge the batteries that run onboard systems including vehicles’ electric ramps — not to mention refrigeration systems, power systems and computers that ConEd, COVID testing units and basic delivery trucks all depend on to keep New York ticking, according to Zach Miller of the Truckers Association of New York.

“There is a kind of lack of understanding that there is an operational need for these trucks to be idling at times,” Miller told The Post. “Without the engine running, the liftgate is not going up and down, not after 15 deliveries that day.”

The DEP has even damned the problems of its own program, with Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala testifying before the council in 2024 that some vigilantes repeatedly committed fraud by submitting the same video multiple times and claiming different violations in each, or outright fabricating reports.

Some citizens have even attempted to assault people while going after their bounties, Aggarwala said.

Local politicians have decried what the program has become and vowed to reform it, with Queens City Councilman and Environmental Committee leader James Gennaro declaring, “The days of the six-figure bounty hunters are over.”

The program has become an occupation,” he said. “The program was not intended to be an occupation.”