Business To Business Logistics

This is an excerpt from a recent 60 minutes piece on Chameleon Carriers.
"The Mechanics of Chameleon Carriers
The segment laid out how easily foreign operators can establish trucking companies in the United States. For $1,000 paid online, with no requirement for American ownership, anyone can secure operating authority from the FMCSA within 21 days.
“There’s no requirement to own a trucking company that you be an American,” Carpenter told Whitaker during the CBS “60 Minutes” broadcast. “You can start it from anywhere in the world. $1,000, pay online, say you are who you say you are, and you’ve got a trucking company.”
The chameleon carrier model operates on a deceptively simple premise: revenue above all else. When a carrier racks up too many violations or crashes, it simply dissolves and reincarnates under a new name with a fresh Department of Transportation number — and a clean slate.
“Chameleon carriers are basically a network of companies and they constantly reincarnate and the idea is we are revenue-focused, we are going to start this trucking company, we are going to run it into the ground to make as much money as we possibly can,” Carpenter said. “And when you move on to the next, you’re really doing that to try to abandon the history that you’ve created with that other trucking company because you’ve run so poorly in the past year. So then you just adopt a new identity and you move on to a new carrier.”
The result is a carrier that appears pristine to shippers and brokers evaluating who should haul their freight.
“You’ve got no violations. You’ve got no crashes. Things that people are gonna look at and scrutinize on whether they’re gonna let you haul their freight or not don’t exist,” Carpenter said. “You’re just a clean carrier to them.”
Carpenter estimates 10% to 20% of the nation’s 700,000 trucking companies operate somewhere on the chameleon carrier spectrum. According to data gathered by risk assessment firm Fusable, these operators are four times more likely to be involved in crashes.