ICE opened a 24-hour CDL fraud tip line on Sept. 9, asking Americans to report suspected fraud by looking at truck drivers. Sikh and South Asian groups called it profiling within 48 hours. Both sides are arguing about the person behind the wheel. Meanwhile, a carrier in Springfield, Illinois, declaring one power unit to the federal government, shows up in roadside inspections on 1,476 separate vehicles, 1,263 of which also run under other DOT numbers, and is connected by shared equipment to 178 other authorities. Truck fraud is never-ending.
WE HAVE THE DATA. WE DON’T NEED IT REPORTED. WE NEED IT ENFORCED. ENFORCED AT THE CARRIER LEVEL.
There is a federal system whose only real job is to make sure that when a truck kills someone, you can find out who is responsible.
Not just who was driving. Who was driving, whether he was qualified, who put him in the seat, who verified that qualification, who owns the tractor, who insured it, who dispatched the load. That is the architecture. The commercial driver’s license and the CDLIS record behind it. The driver qualification file under 49 CFR 391.51. The USDOT number, the MCS-150, the process agent designation, the insurance filing. Each of those exists so that after the crash, an investigator or a plaintiff’s attorney can work backward from the wreckage to a party who can be cited, disqualified, sued, and put out of business.
Identity is the load-bearing element of the whole structure. Both identities. The driver’s and the carrier’s.
On Sept. 9, the Department of Homeland Security launched a 24-hour tip line asking the public to help with one of them. “Too many American lives have been lost or permanently changed because illegal aliens who have no business being on our roads have been granted CDLs,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said. Within two days, the Sikh Coalition called it flagrant profiling. Asian Americans Advancing Justice said materials aimed at “illegal aliens on American roads” fall on Sikh, South Asian, Muslim and Arab communities and arrived on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Hindus for Human Rights said DHS published and then deleted a graphic built on anti-Sikh caricature.
I went back to looking at trucking identities. Pulling FMCSA registration records and roadside inspection data and mapping shared equipment across carrier entities, I wanted to know where the carriers that cannot be identified actually are.
The record
Fleet anomalies: carriers whose declared power units do not match the number of distinct vehicles they appear on in roadside inspections. A carrier telling the federal government it runs one truck while inspectors write it up on hundreds of separate VINs is either filing false census data or operating equipment it has not disclosed. Either way, the federal record is wrong about what is on the road.
Normalize those against each state’s share of the national carrier population, and the distribution is not close.
Illinois holds 3.22% of all registered carriers and 31.5% of the anomalies. That is 9.78 times its expected share. Ohio holds 2.73% and carries 16%, a factor of 5.86. Indiana runs 2.5 times its expected share. The Secretary of State who put them in business is running for Governor. FYI… 4 IL governors have gone to prison, one for CDL fraud. The State is rotten.
Now, the states in the political fight. California is the largest carrier state in the country at 11.18% of all registrations; it is the state that canceled roughly 13,000 non-domiciled CDLs on March 6, 2026; it is the state named in the DHS press release for licensing Harjinder Singh, and it is the state at the center of the “No Name Given” argument that has consumed a year of industry attention. California accounts for 6.5% of fleet anomalies. It runs at 0.58 times expected. Under-represented. New York comes in at 0.11. Georgia at 0.10.
Equipment-fraud concentration in this country is a Chicago-and-Ohio corridor phenomenon, and federal enforcement messaging is aimed almost directly away from it.
The fair concession
Abilene Motor Express, a long-established Virginia carrier, declares one power unit and appears on 744 VINs. John Christner Trucking in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, declares one and appears on 412. KAL Freight in Arlington, Texas, declares one and appears on 604. These are real fleets with real terminals. They have a stale MCS-150 power-unit field, which violates 49 CFR 390.19 and is a serious problem for anyone vetting them, but it is not a chameleon operation.
Owner-operator churn produces the same artifact from the other direction. A carrier running leased owner-operators will show inspection VINs that also appear under other carriers, because the owner-operator took his own truck when he left. That is the normal metabolism of the industry.
So the raw anomaly list mixes three populations: bad paperwork, normal owner-operator movement, and actual undisclosed equipment sharing between affiliated authorities. Separating them requires asking a different question.
What separates them
Does the carrier’s equipment belong to the carrier, or is it circulating?
A real 700-truck fleet with a stale filing has 700 VINs that are exclusively its own. A network moving equipment between authorities has VINs that also appear under other DOT numbers. That is measurable. For every carrier in the inspection record, count the distinct VINs, then count how many of those VINs also appear under at least one other USDOT number.
Apply that filter, and the geography does not wash out. It sharpens. Illinois rises from 31.5% of the anomaly list to 38% of the filtered list. Ohio holds at 83 of 500. Abilene Motor Express drops off entirely, as it should for a legitimate fleet with bad paperwork.
What survives looks like a carrier in Springfield, Illinois, that declares one power unit. It appears in roadside inspections on 1,476 distinct VINs. Of those, 1,263 also run under other DOT numbers, 85.6% of its observed fleet. Follow the equipment, and it connects to 178 other operating authorities, sharing 3,010 vehicles with them.
A carrier in La Grange, Illinois, declares one power unit, appears on 1,377 VINs, 90.1% of which also run elsewhere, and links to 163 other authorities across 3,300 shared vehicles.
A carrier in Lake Zurich declares two, appears on 1,004, and links to 129 authorities.
Roll the whole corridor up, and the cluster anchors distribute 174 in Illinois, 97 in Ohio, and 29 in Indiana. These carriers don’t just happen to share a yard. These are authorities running each other’s trucks at volume.
The cross-check
Among the carriers, the equipment analysis surfaces Trytime Transport and Twin Carrier, which share 254 VINs, and Rocket Expediting. All three are named in the Super Ego Holding class action filed in August 2022 in the Northern District of Illinois, where the complaint alleges the affiliated entities operated as alter egos, altered load confirmation documents to pay drivers less than their contracts specified, and moved drivers between authorities. That litigation involves a potential class estimated at 10,000 to 20,000 drivers.
Tutash Express, a carrier in the Sam Express orbit I documented after the Feb. 3 crash in Jay County, Indiana, that killed Henry Eicher, 50, his sons Menno, 25, and Paul, 19, and family friend Simon Girod, 23, shows 109 directly linked authorities and 933 shared vehicles.
When an independent method built on roadside inspection records reproduces networks that federal litigation and a fatal crash investigation identified separately, the method is measuring something real.
What the rules require
Nothing in the safety regulations prohibits related carriers. You may run 20 authorities with the same officers, address, phone, equipment, and management. Holding companies exist for insurance, tax, and operational reasons, not fraud.
What is required is disclosure and documentation.
Under 49 CFR 390.19 and 390.21, a carrier must keep a current MCS-150 that accurately identifies its operation, officers, address, and fleet; update it biennially and within 30 days of a material change; and deactivate the USDOT number for failure. Under Part 366, a process agent must be designated in every state of operation so legal process can be served. Under Part 376, the truth-in-leasing rules require equipment leases to be written, signed, specific as to compensation and deductions, and retained. Under the financial responsibility filings, the insurer on record must actually cover the operation described, because a policy issued to Authority A does not cover a load dispatched under Authority B.
You may be complicated. You may not be hidden. A carrier declaring one power unit while running 1,476 is not complicated. It is hidden, and it is hidden in a field it self-declared.
The driver’s side
The tip line exists because unqualified drivers kill people. That is true.
On Aug. 12, 2025, a tractor-trailer attempted a U-turn across the Florida Turnpike near mile marker 171. A minivan went under the trailer. Three people died. The record goes back to the driver, Harjinder Singh.
Between March 10 and May 5, 2023, he failed the Washington state CDL knowledge exam 10 times, according to the Florida Attorney General’s office, and failed the air brakes exam twice. The company that trained him attested that he could speak English. Washington issued a full-term CDL in July 2023. California issued a limited-term non-domiciled CDL a year later, leaving him holding commercial credentials from two states at once, in a system whose foundational principle is one driver, one license. On July 3, 2025, New Mexico State Police stopped him for speeding, eight days after failure to meet the federal English proficiency requirement became a driver out-of-service violation nationwide. Bodycam footage shows the officer struggling to understand him. He drove away. After the crash, FMCSA administered the English Language Proficiency assessment. He answered 2 of 12 verbal questions correctly and identified 1 of 4 highway traffic signs.
His employer, White Hawk Carriers, is a defendant in a wrongful death action alleging it knew or should have known he lacked lawful status, English proficiency, and the qualifications required of a commercial driver. C.H. Robinson has been named on the brokerage side.
A training school certified a skill it never tested. Two states issued credentials. A roadside officer had out-of-service authority for this exact condition and didn’t use it. A carrier never built a qualification file. Five verification steps, five misses, and not one of them required knowing where the driver was born.
English proficiency is a skill standard the government switched off
The English requirement is not new, and it is not an invention of the current administration. FMCSA’s proposed rule published Aug. 10, 2026 states the agency has had English proficiency requirements dating to 1936. The operative regulation, 49 CFR 391.11(b)(2), requires a driver to read and speak English well enough to converse with the general public, understand highway traffic signs and signals, respond to official inquiries, and make legible entries on reports.
Those are four job functions. Converse with the public is the motorist you just hit. Understand signs and signals is the low clearance and the runaway ramp. Respond to official inquiries is the officer under your tractor, hands on the slack adjuster, telling you to release the brakes. Make legible entries in the post-accident report.
Every one of those is a skill. A third-generation Punjabi American from Fresno passes it. A monolingual French speaker from Quebec fails it. The standard does not care where you were born, and that is exactly what makes it enforceable.
The enforcement history is the scandal nobody covering the tip line has reported. CVSA added 391.11(b)(2) violations to the North American Standard Out-of-Service Criteria effective April 1, 2005, then removed them effective April 1, 2015. FMCSA issued policy memorandum MC-ECE-2016-006 on June 15, 2016, directing personnel to cite English proficiency violations without placing drivers out of service. For nine years, federal policy was that a driver who could not read a stop sign got a citation and kept rolling.
That reversed after the April 28, 2025 executive order. FMCSA issued guidance on May 20, 2025, establishing a two-step roadside assessment and prohibiting translation tools. CVSA restored the out-of-service consequence effective June 25, 2025. It appears in the printed April 1, 2026 criteria. A proposed rule to codify it was published Aug. 10, 2026. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has announced the emergency removal of countless commercial driver training schools from the federal registry, saying those 110 accounted for 5,000 English proficiency violations.
Harjinder Singh was licensed in the middle of the window when the standard was switched off. That is a regulatory abdication with a date range, and it better explains that crash than anything a civilian could have reported by phone.
Foreign naming conventions defeat identification. The specific version involves commercial licenses reading “NO NAME GIVEN” in the first-name field.
Mononyms are legal in the United States and accepted on U.S. passports. California’s DMV stated that it enters the name as it appears on the identity document and that the policy is identical for every license type it issues. The REAL ID star on those credentials means the DMV verified lawful status and Social Security.
In FMCSA registration data, the surname Singh appears on 36,795 carriers across only 5,623 distinct full names, a compression roughly three times that of Smith, Johnson, or Garcia. Kaur, the corresponding mandated Sikh surname, shows the same compression. Patel, a common South Asian surname with no naming mandate, shows greater name diversity than Smith. The compression tracks the naming convention. That’s an identity problem that boils down to a dummy lesson. “Rob, hand me the red apple.” Rob’s response: “Which one? They’re all red apples.” Identity is everything in trucking because accountability is everything in trucking.
The officer name Gurpreet Singh appears on 844 carrier registrations. Those 844 entities carry 800 distinct phone numbers, 816 distinct addresses, and 785 distinct email addresses. One operator running 844 shells shows up as 844 entities sharing three phones and one address. This is 844 men, each with their own phone, address, and email, who share a name. Harpreet Singh, Amandeep Singh and Manpreet Singh all behave identically, and so do Nestor Navia, Michael Johnson and Jose Rodriguez.
One show of real consolidation: 479 entities across 97 phones and 223 addresses, a ratio near 5:1. The name is the weakest key in the system and always was, for Smith as much as for Singh.
The gap bites because FMCSA collects officer identity as unverified free text with no unique key attached. That is a real hole; it is universal, and FMCSA’s Motus registration modernization is already building identity verification. Requiring a verified officer key at registration closes it for every surname at once. Motus is another discussion for another day; it has its issues too.
Who is inside these networks?
The Super Ego complaint alleges drivers were promised 88% of gross revenue and received falsified rate confirmations showing less, were overcharged for fuel, and paid for insurance that was voidable because they were dispatched under a different authority than the one named on the policy. A federal civil complaint in the Sam Express orbit, Tsybikov v. Dovgal, describes the same structure: the same 88% promise, $14,000 in fuel deductions exceeding what was physically possible for the miles driven, a 12% dispatch fee for services not independently provided, and drivers transferred to a different authority after a safety incident, resetting the record.
Those plaintiffs are Eastern European, Central Asian, and South Asian immigrant drivers. So are the defendants.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has a name for that and has prosecuted it for decades. Affinity fraud, in the SEC’s description, preys on members of identifiable groups such as religious or ethnic communities, and the fraudsters who promote it frequently are, or pretend to be, members of the group. They recruit through respected community figures. The tight structure that makes a community function is the same structure that makes the fraud hard for regulators to see, and victims often try to resolve it inside the community rather than going to authorities.
That is the oldest shape in white-collar crime. It explains why these networks are co-ethnic without requiring any claim about anyone’s culture, and it puts the immigrant trucking community where the evidence puts it: as the primary victim pool.
It also means those drivers occupy both roles at once. They are being robbed, and they are operating heavy equipment they may not be qualified to operate. Holding both facts is the only honest way to write about this. Most probably don’t even realize how deep they’re in the hole until they’re broke, their credit is ruined, and they can’t find work. Meanwhile, the owner, under a fake name moves on.
How we got here
The government has known since a charter bus carrying Vietnamese Catholic pilgrims went off an overpass near Sherman, Texas, in 2008, killing 17 people. The operator was a reincarnation of a shut-down carrier.
GAO published the findings in March 2012 as GAO-12-364. Carriers with chameleon attributes rose from 759 in 2005 to 1,136 in 2010. Eighteen percent of applicants with chameleon attributes were later involved in severe crashes, compared with 6% of applicants without them. FMCSA’s vetting program screened only passenger and household goods carriers, excluding freight truck carriers, which made up 98% of all new applicants.
Congress appropriated $3.5 million. FMCSA built ARCHI, which it described to Congress in 2013 as an automated screen that matches business names, addresses, phone numbers, FEINs, officer names, VINs, and commercial relationships, assigns a match score, and flags scores of 1.5 or higher. In 2021, FMCSA granted 109,340 new carrier authorities, an 84% increase over the prior year. Fourteen years after the GAO report, the agency still does not publish how many applications ARCHI flags, how many it manually reviews, or how many it denies.
Every fix here attaches to a record, and every one is rulemaking under existing authority.
Two men
Harjinder Singh failed a knowledge exam 10 times, was certified anyway, licensed twice, stopped once by an officer who could not understand him and had authority to park him, and drove until three people died under his trailer. He is charged with three counts of vehicular homicide. The school, the two states, and the carrier are all still there.
In Springfield, La Grange, Cicero, and Cincinnati, sit authorities declaring one truck and running fourteen hundred, linked by equipment that circulates across DOT numbers the way cash moves through a shell company. Nobody is calling a hotline about them. Nobody has to. They filed the numbers themselves, and the numbers have been sitting in the federal record the whole time. I have 4 fatality litigation expert witness cases in these fleet networks and over two dozen with Super Ego or SE-related entities, another two dozen or more with other chameleon networks and organizations. This is something that real, and it’s killing a lot of people.
The registration system was supposed to guarantee that after the crash you could find everyone responsible. Right now, it guarantees little on identity and location, which means a long investigation to reach accountability.