One truck on paper, thousands on the road. A group of 32 auto-transport carriers reported 38 trucks to federal regulators. Their inspection records show more than 6,000 vehicles. How the FMCSA is shutting them down.
The migration into the slow lane
The pressure on long-haul Class 8 trucking has built steadily over the past year and a half. English-language proficiency is again an out-of-service violation. The rules on non-domiciled commercial licenses are tightening. The electronic logging mandate closed the hours-of-service gaps that thin-margin carriers once relied on. For an operator built on cheap drivers, light paperwork and a minimum policy, long-haul stopped paying.
Many of those operators moved into hotshot and auto transport. A one-ton pickup pulling a car-hauler attracts fewer inspections than a tractor-trailer, and its insurance costs a fraction of a Class 8 fleet’s. The equipment is also easy to move. A pickup and a gooseneck trailer can be retitled, replated and run under a new limited liability company in a matter of days.
The shift shows up in the equipment. Of roughly 500 vehicles that appear under more than one carrier in this network, 46 percent are Ford and Ram pickups and another 14 percent are Kaufman-style car-hauler trailers. Almost none are heavy freight trucks. The timing tracks the broader auto-haul market. When Jack Cooper, a 97-year-old unionized auto hauler, shut down in early 2025 after losing its Ford and General Motors contracts, the finished-vehicle freight it carried did not disappear. It dispersed down the chain into smaller carriers, and some of those carriers are in this group.
The network is also recent. Twenty-six of the 32 carriers hold DOT numbers issued recently enough to date their authority to 2023 or later, and 21 trace to 2024 and 2025. Their insurance filings follow the same line, with 26 of the most recent policies bound during 2025, most in the spring and summer. This is a wave that formed over the past 18 months and had already generated thousands of inspections before the connections between the companies became visible.
Tenure, or the lack thereof, is where the system is weakest
A newly authorized carrier enters an 18-month new-entrant window during which the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is supposed to run a safety audit before the authority becomes permanent. The problem is arithmetic. The agency processes well over 150,000 new carrier registrations a year and cannot audit a meaningful share of them inside that window. A carrier that draws scrutiny, fails a new entrant review, or has its authority headed for revocation does not have to fight it. It can let that DOT number lapse and file for a fresh one, and the clock starts over with a clean record and another 18 months of runway. The vehicles, the drivers and the people behind them carry forward. Only the identifier changes. A cluster of authorities that are almost all a year or two old is the signature of operators who treat the DOT number as disposable, and who reach for a new one the moment an old one becomes a liability.
The same truck, different doors
The clearest evidence is the shared VIN. One Ford F-350, carrying Illinois plate DRL6327, was inspected 15 times under seven different carrier DOT numbers in 12 states. The most-inspected unit in the set, another Ford on plate P1295664, drew 17 stops across a dozen states. Across the network, single vehicles surface under three, four, five, and six separate authorities. These aren’t driveaway towaway, these are real freight carriers.
The plates swap too. A carrier running its own equipment shows roughly one tag per truck. These carriers show more plates than trucks. Sakara LLC, registered to two power units in Otis Orchards, Washington, accounts for 682 VINs wearing 695 plates. Suplicium shows 681 plates on 675 VINs. Cobra Inc shows 303 plates on 288 VINs. At the level of an individual vehicle, the pattern is insane. One car-hauler turned up under four carriers wearing eight different plates across 14 inspections, most of them near-identical variations on a single Illinois number with a Maine tag mixed in. Others ran on plates reading APPLIED, TEMP, or NOTAG. A trooper at the scale and a toll camera on the interstate both read the plate, not the VIN, so a shifting or temporary tag breaks the link between a violation and the truck that earned it.
How the companies connect
Secretary Sean Duffy described the problem in nearly the same terms in February, when he said the government cannot allow 200 DOT numbers to trace back to a single post office box.
The ownership ties show up in the people. Anton Mapin, listed on Tsar Transportation in Illinois, also appears on an entity in Connecticut. Gulbakhor Mukhammadieva, on LBS Logistics, also controls a second Illinois carrier. Ara Sarkisyan runs both Sakara and Rideon in eastern Washington. Officer-name matching has limits, since common names collide, but distinctive names recurring across separate authorities are the kind of link a phone-number or address query never catches. The equipment is shared, the formation infrastructure is shared, and a handful of operators turn up again and again behind nominally unrelated companies.
Run as a network rather than a list, the structure is hard to argue with. The carriers that share equipment resolve into a single connected web, not a set of unrelated one-truck firms, and that web breaks down into three tighter operating cells. The same Auto Haul Express that anchors the equipment sits at the center of the network by every measure of connectedness. Tested against a model that randomly reshuffles the same vehicles across the same carriers, the volume of equipment these companies share comes in roughly 20 standard deviations above what chance would produce. A result three standard deviations from the mean is already treated as no coincidence. This is far past that. The shared iron is not an artifact of a busy used-truck market.
The web also has a geography. Of the carriers in and around this network, just under half are registered in Illinois, and another one in seven is in Ohio. The two states together account for nearly 60 percent of the group. Within Illinois, the addresses bunch even tighter, in the Chicago suburbs of Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates, Palatine, Arlington Heights and the registered-agent suites of Springfield. A second pole sits in eastern Washington, around Spokane. When the formation addresses are traced outward to every carrier that shares them, the same suites recur: a single address in Canton, Ohio, ties to 16 carriers, a Spokane suite to a dozen more, a Fargo address to several others in the network. The officers carry the same concentration. The recurring names on these authorities are overwhelmingly Eastern European and Central Asian, the same handful surfacing across nominally unrelated companies and clustered in the same metro areas. That pattern, the same kind of operator forming the same kind of carrier through the same suites in the same cities, is what a list of 236 individual registrations hides and a network map shows.
A number that does not survive
Every carrier files a form called the MCS-150, on which it reports its mileage and truck count. Those two figures are what regulators and insurers use to size a carrier’s exposure, and neither is checked against anything.
In this group, the mileage figure collapses on inspection. Five carriers reported driving exactly one mile for the year. One of them is Auto Haul Express, the same company that appears in 749 inspections across 43 states. Three others reported between 2.9 million and 15.3 million miles on one or two trucks, a figure no truck can produce, since even a hard-run unit covers about 130,000 miles a year. The remaining 21 carriers reported no mileage at all. Of the 32, only one reported a number in a believable range.
The truck count tells the same story in shorthand. One unit, one unit, one unit, against a footprint that crosses the country.
Two insurers, then none
Premium is built on one self-declared truck. The actual exposure is hundreds of vehicles operating under that authority, in dozens of states, driven by people the underwriter never evaluated. The carrier was priced as one truck and is running a fleet.
These carriers are not insured by obscure offshore programs. They are insured by some of the largest names in the business. Of the 32 carriers’ most recent filings, companies in the Progressive group wrote 59 percent and companies in the GEICO group wrote another 28 percent, most through the kind of fast-issue commercial-auto programs that bind coverage off a self-reported application.
The policies are short-lived. Across the group, the filing history shows coverage that rarely lasts a full quarter, with a median of 92 days before cancellation. One policy ran for five days. One was bound and canceled the same day. The same rhythm repeats company to company: bind a minimum policy, run the fleet for a few
Source: FreightWaves
Compiled from international media by the SCI.AI editorial team.
