Crooks find all kinds of ways to do crimes in the trucking industry. Hardly a week goes by without a headline about smugglers carrying illegal substances across state lines, or entire schemes issuing fake CDLs to unqualified drivers. And when it comes to safety, some of the offenses can only be described as gross negligence. That doesn’t stop some operators, however, as 60 Minutes just ran an exposé on so-called “chameleon carriers” that bypass safety enforcement on drive time regulations and janky equipment by simply changing their company name.
All of the program’s findings came after an eight-month investigation where reporters spoke with truckers, both domestic and abroad. The 60 Minutes segment largely focused on Super Ego Holding, which you may have seen on semi-trailers before. It’s a network of commercial trucking and leasing companies that operate in the United States, though it also has Serbian ties.
“Chameleon carriers are basically a network of companies, and they constantly reincarnate,” explained Rob Carpenter, a trucking safety consultant, to 60 Minutes. “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 continued, “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, right? So then you just adopt a new identity and you move on to a new carrier.”
By changing all of a truck’s identifying information, like the freight operator name and Department of Transportation number, they effectively create an all-new rig—at least, as far as regulatory agencies can see. Carpenter said this is because you can “start [a new company] from anywhere in the world. $1,000, pay online, say you are who you say you are, and you’ve got a trucking company.”
60 Minutes spoke to seven drivers who had contracted with Super Ego Holding. One of them, named Daniel Sanchez, described the conditions as almost dystopian. “They’d have me go out and do anything to get the money, no matter what the risk,” Sanchez said. “They don’t care if I got a violation or went to jail, whatever, for any reason. The next day, they’d have another driver in that truck and keep on goin’.”
Sanchez recounted a time when he claims Super Ego had him scrub his truck’s identifying markers. “They’d email you, or they’d send you some kind of documentation with a picture of the new name and DOT number,” he said. “They’d have me print it out, buy some duct tape. Come out, put it on the truck.”
It didn’t stop there, either. Sanchez said that when he reached the established 11-hour drive time limit, managers in Serbia would often illegally reset the federally mandated clocks so he could continue toward the delivery site. That poses an obvious danger to the truck drivers involved and also to everyone they share the road with.
Overall, the 60 Minutes feature painted a damning picture of Super Ego Holding, and the company has since called the report “misleading” in a statement to the Serbian Times. For its part, Super Ego claims it is “an equipment leasing company, not a carrier company,” arguing that all claims about its involvement in altered driver clocks, DOT numbers, and pay are “false.”
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