In the Old West, a man could rob a stagecoach, cross into the next territory, and start fresh with a new name. There were no fingerprints. No databases. No way to objectively prove identity beyond a wanted poster and an eyewitness who might be hundreds of miles away. If you could outrun the immediate pursuit, you could reinvent yourself and do it all again.
The American freight industry in 2026 operates under similar conditions.
A fraudster with an internet connection, a burner phone, and $2,000 for a bond premium can access billions of dollars in freight. They can impersonate legitimate carriers, hijack operating authority, steal loads, disappear with payments, and emerge the next day under a new identity to do it again. The technology exists to stop them. The regulatory framework does not require it.
This is the story of how we got here, and why the problem keeps getting worse.
The Regulated Era When Identity Was Implicit
Before 1980, freight fraud as we know it today was virtually impossible.
The Interstate Commerce Commission controlled every aspect of motor carrier operations. To haul freight across state lines, a trucking company needed a “certificate of public convenience and necessity”, and getting one was nearly impossible. Existing carriers could protest any new application. Routes were rigidly assigned. Rates were collectively set through rate bureaus with antitrust immunity. The system was wasteful, inefficient, and anti-competitive, but it was also remarkably fraud-resistant.
In 1978, approximately 17,000 motor carriers operated under ICC regulation. Everyone knew everyone. A carrier’s reputation was its operating authority, often worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on the open market. You couldn’t simply close the shop and reopen under a new name because obtaining that certificate required years of effort, public testimony, and survival of protests from established carriers who wanted to keep you out.
Identity wasn’t verified because it didn’t need to be. The barriers to entry were so high that bad actors couldn’t get in. The system’s inefficiency was also its security.
1980: The Door Opens
On July 1, 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Motor Carrier Act into law. The premise was straightforward: competition would replace regulation, market forces would set prices, and consumers would benefit from lower shipping costs.
“No longer will trucks travel empty because of rules absurdly limiting the kinds of goods a truck may carry,” Carter declared at the signing ceremony. “No longer will trucks be forced to travel hundreds of miles out of their way for no reason.”
He was right about efficiency. By 1985, deregulation saved shippers an estimated $7.8 billion annually through lower rates. By 1998, operating costs per vehicle-mile had fallen by 75 percent for truckload carriers. Intermodal shipping flourished. Just-in-time manufacturing became possible. What nobody anticipated was the security issues that would follow.
The MCA shifted the burden of proof for obtaining operating authority from the applicant to anyone who wanted to challenge the application. Within a decade, the number of carriers more than doubled. By 1995, when the ICC Termination Act eliminated most remaining restrictions, the floodgates were fully open. Today, more than 800,000 motor carriers hold active operating authority, a forty-seven-fold increase from the regulated era.
A 1981 Government Accountability Office report noted concerns that “an increased number of carriers may be operating illegally” due to reduced ICC enforcement efforts. The agency was already struggling to verify who was actually operating trucks on American highways.
The Chameleon Emerges: 1990s-2000s
With barriers to entry essentially eliminated, a new carrier species evolved and entered the chameleon.
The tactic was elegant in its simplicity. Operate a trucking company with minimal safety investment. Accumulate violations, penalties, and poor inspection results. When enforcement catches up, close the company. Transfer the trucks and drivers to a new entity. Apply for a fresh operating authority. Start over with a clean record.
The term “chameleon carrier” or “reincarnated carrier” didn’t enter the regulatory vocabulary until the late 2000s, but the practice had been building for years. Industry veterans watched helplessly as operators with horrific safety records simply dissolved and reappeared under new names, continuing to put dangerous equipment on the road while legitimate carriers invested in compliance.
The pattern became undeniable after a series of catastrophic crashes. In 2008, a charter bus carrying Vietnamese Catholic pilgrims crashed in Sherman, Texas, killing 17 people. Investigators discovered the operator had a history of safety violations under previous company names, violations that hadn’t followed him into his new authority.
The crash forced a reckoning. The FMCSA began a vetting program for charter bus companies and household goods movers. But freight carriers, the largest category of applicants, remained largely unscreened.
In 2012, a GAO study found that 1,136 new applicants in 2010 alone exhibited “chameleon” characteristics, shared addresses, phone numbers, and ownership patterns with previously sanctioned carriers. Eighteen percent of suspected chameleons had been involved in severe crashes, compared to just six percent of non-chameleon carriers.
Three times the crash rate. Same highways. Different names.
Do We Have a Solution?
Congress responded to the GAO findings by directing FMCSA to develop a risk-based methodology to screen all applicants for chameleon carrier behavior. The result was ARCHI, Application Review and Chameleon Investigation,a prototype vetting system that used pattern recognition to identify suspicious applications.
ARCHI worked by cross-referencing new applications against known red flags: shared addresses with shut-down carriers, overlapping ownership structures, common phone numbers, and similar equipment patterns. When both “match” and “motive” were present, indicators suggesting both the ability and the incentive to reincarnate, applications were flagged for manual review.
It was never intended to remain a prototype. According to internal documentation, ARCHI was supposed to become part of a comprehensive, automated vetting workflow integrated into the broader Unified Registration System. That was 2013.
More than a decade later, the URS modernization remains incomplete. ARCHI appears to have operated on something like autopilot, functional but understaffed, identifying patterns but lacking resources for follow-through. Meanwhile, chameleon carriers continued to slip through.
The Specialized Solutions case in Michigan illustrates the gap. In 2016, FMCSA investigators documented that Anvar Akhmedov had operated at least four trucking companies, three of which had been put out of service. A compliance review explicitly predicted that “Azda Logistics will most likely reincarnate itself as Specialized Solutions LLC to avoid an adverse safety rating or history.”
That’s exactly what happened. Despite the documented prediction, Specialized Solutions received operating authority. When confronted by investigators, Akhmedov admitted switching company names specifically to hide his troubled safety record from customers. As of late 2025, he appears to be connected to multiple active carriers, including one with a vehicle-out-of-service rate of 42 percent, nearly double the national average.
The Digital Accelerant: 2010s-2020s
If deregulation opened the door to fraud and regulatory neglect left it unguarded, digital transformation kicked it off its hinges.
Load boards transformed how freight moves in America. What once required phone calls, personal relationships, and industry reputation could now happen with a few keystrokes. An estimated 16,000 freight brokers and 400,000 carriers operate in digital marketplaces where a single load might touch four or five different entities during transit. The efficiency gains were enormous. So was the fraud opportunity.
Double brokering, the practice of re-brokering a load without authorization, exploded. The scheme works like this: a fraudulent operator bids on a load posted by a legitimate broker, wins the contract, then immediately re-posts the load at a lower rate. A second carrier picks it up, delivers the freight, and waits for payment that never comes. The double broker disappears with the spread.
Between Q4 2022 and Q1 2023, the load board Truckstop reported a 400 percent increase in double-brokering complaints. Overall, freight fraud jumped 130 percent in 2023, with roughly 69 percent involving some form of double brokering. Industry estimates suggest the practice extracts between $500 million and $700 million annually from transportation networks, and that’s likely conservative.
The schemes have grown sophisticated. Bad actors now approach struggling carriers nearing closure with offers to buy their credentials and login information for load boards and brokerage platforms, sometimes purchased via PayPal or Venmo, without paperwork. They operate legitimately for a period to build trust, then rotate in compromised identities to start stealing freight. “Maria,” operating on Telegram messenger, sold over 200 carrier identities last year and even brazenly built her own open backend vibe-coded MC# marketplace. It even has a scrollable, Tinder-esque list of CDL photos where you can find a driver for your fleet, some of whom are clearly non-domiciled.
In one recurring scheme, a carrier picks up electronics from a California warehouse, then reroutes the trailer within 30 to 60 miles to a secondary location. The trailer doors are modified with reversed hinges for rapid removal. The product is extracted, a few pallets are left behind, a new bill of lading is printed, and the skeleton delivery continues to its destination. By the time anyone realizes what happened, the thieves are gone.
The Insurance Gateway
Of all the barriers to entry that once filtered out bad actors, insurance remains the most significant and the most eroded.
Captive insurance programs represent what accountability looks like when stakeholders have skin in the game. Members of a captive share risk and exposure collectively. That shared liability creates powerful incentives for vetting. Prospective members undergo rigorous assessment before joining. Existing members face ongoing operational reviews, claims analysis, and risk control evaluations. Failing to maintain standards, the captive holds you accountable through alert status and remediation requirements. Refuse to improve, and you’re removed, back to the traditional market with your record following you.
This is why you seldom see large legacy carrier fleets of repute using the Geicos and Progressives of the industry. Captives reward carriers for their investment in safety and risk management. The assessment process itself filters out operators who can’t or won’t meet standards.
Then there’s the other end of the spectrum.
Last year, Geico entered the commercial truck insurance market with a model that mirrors everything wrong with freight’s approach to identity. Go online. Self-attest. Get a quote. Make a payment. Receive bound insurance immediately. No prospect assessment. No ongoing risk control reviews. No claims pattern analysis. Just coverage, available to anyone with a credit card.
When the insurance barrier falls, the last meaningful filter disappears. You can rent a truck. You can rent a trailer. You can get operating authority with minimal documentation. But historically, you couldn’t rent insurance; someone had to underwrite the risk, and that underwriting process created accountability.
Now even that gateway stands open.
Insurance is the most expensive expense to enter this industry. It’s supposed to be. The premium reflects risk, and assessing risk requires knowing who you’re insuring. When carriers can self-attest their way to coverage without meaningful evaluation, we’ve removed the final lock from a door that was already hanging off its hinges.
The Moral Erosion Underneath the System’s Failure
The identity problem is real. The regulatory gaps are documented. But underneath the system’s failure is something harder to quantify: we’ve built an industry that no longer requires consideration of others.
Before deregulation, the barriers to entry were locks that kept even the righteous righteous. When it takes years to earn operating authority, when your reputation is your currency, and when everyone in the industry knows everyone else, you think twice before cutting corners. The system forced accountability through friction.
Remove the lock, and you find out who was only behaving because the lock existed.
Today, anyone with $2,000, a burner phone, and an unvetted self-attested application can access billions in freight. No office required, a $39 virtual mailbox works fine. You might have 18 months before anyone conducts a new-entrant audit, if they ever do. In 18 months, a bad actor can wreak havoc, steal money, close shop, and disappear. The barrier that once filtered out those without skin in the game now filters out almost no one.
What rushed through that open door wasn’t just criminals; it was a mindset. A way of doing business that doesn’t consider the people you share the road with. Doesn’t consider the businesses you transact with. Doesn’t consider the taxpaying public funding the highways. Just revenue, by whatever means necessary. The erosion didn’t start with organized fraud rings or sophisticated cargo theft operations. It started with white lies.
I drove in the days before cell phones, when we’d pull loose-leaf from our binders or grab one of our six log books. We told ourselves we were just doing what we needed to do to make more money. But that was still crossing a line. A white lie is still not righteous. Forging hours to run more miles was killing people; we just didn’t frame it that way. We framed it as a hustle. But underneath, we were saying: my revenue matters more than the truth, more than the rules, more than the people sharing this road with me.
Every time you cross that line, it moves. Every white lie makes the next one easier. The moral fabric erodes one small compromise at a time until you look up and the industry is full of people who never had a line to begin with, or learned from the rest of us that lines are meant to be crossed.
The fraudsters who now dominate the dark corners of freight didn’t arrive with fully formed criminal business models. They learned the systems. They identified the loopholes. They adapted. And they did it in an environment where the industry had already normalized cutting corners, where consideration of others had become optional, where the only question that mattered was: Can I get away with it?
Technology didn’t create this problem. It accelerated it. Digital load boards and instant authority gave scale to a mindset that was already metastasizing. The stagecoach robbers were always out there. We just handed them faster horses and better maps.
The Root of All Fraud Is Identity
Every form of freight fraud, chameleon carriers, double brokering, cargo theft, credential hijacking, ultimately reduces to a single failure: the inability to verify identity.
In criminal investigations, identity verification evolved dramatically over the past century. Fingerprinting became standard in the early 1900s. DNA evidence emerged in the 1980s. Digital forensics can now trace IP addresses, geolocate devices, and reconstruct cyber intrusions. A stagecoach robber who rode into the next territory no longer escapes, his fingerprints follow him everywhere. Freight hasn’t caught up, but barriers foster ingenuity for more advanced methods of fraud.
FMCSA’s registration system doesn’t require biometric authentication. Operating authority can be obtained with minimal documentation. Safety records are stored separately from registration and insurance records, making it difficult to connect entities with shared ownership. A carrier can be put out of service, and the same owner can register a new company with a new authority, operating the same trucks from the same address, without triggering automatic alerts.
Private industry has tried to fill the gap. Companies like SearchCarriers.com, Genlogs, and Freight Validate have built tools to identify suspicious patterns, shared addresses, phone numbers, VINs, and ownership structures that suggest chameleon behavior. DAT developed an Alias Search function that cross-references contact information against historical data from shut-down carriers.
The fact that private companies felt compelled to build these tools, and that shippers and brokers pay for them, tells you everything about federal enforcement effectiveness.
We are building the fingerprints after the fact. The evidence infrastructure that should exist before crimes occur is being constructed reactively, by private enterprise, while regulators issue memos about problems identified a decade ago.
2025 and The Reckoning We Need
In November 2025, an internal DOT memo surfaced describing a renewed effort to address chameleon-carrier fraud using a “data-driven severity matrix.” The memo cited pattern recognition of SAFER and registration data, essentially the same approach that ARCHI was supposed to implement more than a decade earlier.
It read as if the problem had just been discovered.
FMCSA now receives approximately 70,000 new applications annually. The vast majority are not cross-checked against historical chameleon carrier data. The Unified Registration System, which was supposed to modernize tracking, remains incomplete after more than a decade of delays. Enforcement actions against double brokering, while increasing, remain rare relative to the scale of the problem.
Meanwhile, the Transportation Intermediaries Association notes that there have been 80,000 freight fraud complaints in recent years, and virtually no civil penalties have been issued for violations. The maximum fine of $10,000 per illegal transaction sounds steep until you calculate the math: if you’re stealing $1,000 per load across thousands of drivers, occasional fines are simply the cost of doing business.
The legitimate carrier, paying for insurance, maintaining equipment, investing in driver training, and following the rules, competes against operators who do none of those things and who can vanish and reappear if anyone catches up to them.
The Fingerprints We Already Have
Ironically enough, a biometric identity verification system for transportation workers already exists. We just don’t use it for the people moving $14 trillion in freight.
The Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) has been required since 2007 for unescorted access to secure areas of maritime ports and vessels. The process is exactly what freight identity verification should look like. Applicants undergo TSA security threat assessments. They submit to FBI criminal background checks. They enroll in biometrics, including fingerprints, through Idemia, the credentialing contractor. The credential ties a verified identity to a physical person who showed up, in person, and proved who they are.
You cannot self-attest your way to a TWIC card. The infrastructure exists. The enrollment centers exist. The biometric database exists. Idemia already operates credentialing programs across transportation and government sectors. The model is proven, scalable, and functional.
Yet a driver can obtain a CDL, an owner can obtain motor carrier authority, and a broker can obtain a license, all without ever submitting to the identity verification rigor that a longshoreman faces just to walk onto a dock.
We decided that port security required knowing exactly who was accessing secure facilities. We decided that airport security required biometric verification. But somehow we decided that access to billions of dollars in freight, to highways shared with the motoring public, to an industry plagued by identity fraud, didn’t require the same standard.
The fingerprint moment isn’t waiting for new technology. The technology has been deployed for nearly two decades. What’s waiting is the will to apply it.
The Solutions That Exist But Don’t
The technology to solve freight identity fraud exists today. Mandatory biometric authentication could tie operating authority to verifiable individuals. Blockchain-based credential systems could create immutable records tracking ownership and transfers. Real-time verification requirements could ensure carriers are who they claim to be before loads are tendered. Insurance minimums could reflect actual risk rather than 1980s cost structures.
What’s lacking is a consensus that the friction these measures would create is worth the security they would provide.
The freight industry moved $14 trillion in goods last year. It cannot function without trust: trust that the carrier picking up your load is who they claim to be, trust that the broker paying you will actually pay, and trust that the load you accepted exists and will be where it’s supposed to be.
That trust has been systematically exploited for four decades. The exploitation is accelerating. At some point, the industry will have to decide whether the cost of verification is worth the cost of fraud. Right now, the numbers suggest it hasn’t decided yet.
The Fingerprint Moment
In 1892, an Argentine police official named Juan Vucetich solved a double murder using fingerprint evidence, the first criminal case ever resolved through this method. Within two decades, fingerprinting became standard practice in law enforcement worldwide. It didn’t eliminate crime. But it made accountability possible. Freight is still waiting for its fingerprint moment.
The era of stagecoach robbery ended not because criminals stopped stealing, but because the cost of crime finally exceeded the reward. Identity became verifiable. Accountability became enforceable. Running to the next territory no longer provided escape.
Until freight reaches that point, until “are you who you say you are” becomes a question with a definitive answer, the fraud will continue. Chameleon carriers will keep reincarnating. Double brokers will keep disappearing. Loads will keep vanishing.
Somewhere, a fraudster with a burner phone, maybe in eastern Europe or India, and a bond premium is already planning tomorrow’s heist.
The solution isn’t just better vetting systems or biometric authentication, though we need those. It’s remembering that freight is a business built on trust, and trust requires people who won’t cross certain lines even when no one is watching. We used to call that character. Somewhere along the way, we decided it was optional.
