Chameleon trucking companies evade safety rules, threaten road safety nationwide

Unsafe trucking companies have learned how to outrun federal oversight by changing names, keeping the same trucks and drivers, and reappearing under fresh DOT numbers after safety violations pile up. The result is a public-safety loophole on highways across the United States, where a bad record can disappear from view even when the risk has not.

CBS News’ 60 Minutes, with correspondent Bill Whitaker, focused on Super Ego Holding, a network of trucking and leasing companies based in Serbia and the United States that is under federal investigation and named in a class action lawsuit. The reporting also traced the operation through truck stops in Florida and through sources in Europe, underscoring how far the network stretched and how difficult it could be to pin down a company that keeps changing identity.

The danger was flagged years ago. In 2012, the Government Accountability Office found that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s vetting and new entrant programs were not well designed to identify suspected chameleon carriers. The watchdog also found that 18% of applicants with chameleon attributes were involved in severe crashes, compared with 6% of new applicants without those attributes. GAO said FMCSA had not determined the total number of chameleon carriers in the industry and did not have enough resources to investigate every new applicant.

FMCSA told Congress in 2013 that it was developing a risk-based vetting methodology to identify chameleon carriers applying for operating authority. But the basic business model that investigators have described still exploits the same weakness: fleets can keep the same equipment, the same drivers and the same business relationships while a new corporate shell hides the old violations.

That failure came back into focus in March 2026, when federal officials moved against carriers tied to a deadly crash in Jay County, Indiana. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FMCSA took four more companies out of service: KG Line Group Inc., Tutash Express 1 LLC, RPM Hauling and Valcins Trucking LLC. Reporting on the case described them as part of a coordinated chameleon carrier network, after earlier actions had already targeted related entities.

The crackdown has widened beyond one crash. DOT and FMCSA have been targeting fraudulent CDL schools and licensing problems in 2026, while enforcement priorities also include falsified hours-of-service logs, fraudulently obtained CDLs, falsified maintenance records and fraudulent drug and alcohol testing. FMCSA says its mission is to improve large truck and bus safety, but the pattern exposed by chameleon carriers shows how easily repeat offenders can slip through gaps that were meant to protect everyone else on the road.