Rob Carpenter spent eight months wondering if CBS would make him look like a fool.
The trucking safety consultant, FreightWaves contributor and 25-year industry veteran had never worked with a major television news crew before agreeing to help “60 Minutes.” They were investigating chameleon carriers — the commercial trucking fleets that shed one identity for another after racking up flagrant safety violations. The Serbian-connected scheme he’d been tracking for years was finally getting national attention, but Carpenter had concerns about how the final product would portray him.
“I don’t think I’ve watched 60 Minutes since I was a kid with my grandparents,” Carpenter said in an interview with FreightWaves. “It was one of those situations where I wondered if they were going to cut it up and make me say something that I didn’t say.”
They didn’t.
Instead, what emerged Sunday night was a 15-minute segment exposing Super Ego Holding, a network of commercial trucking and leasing companies based in Serbia and the U.S. that federal regulators call one of the most notorious chameleon schemes operating on American highways. The investigation painted a damning picture of an industry loophole that puts 260 million Americans at risk every time they share the road with these carriers.
The Anatomy of an Eight-Month Investigation
What surprised Carpenter most was the CBS team’s slow and methodical approach. Led by correspondent Bill Whitaker and producers Ashley Velie and Eliza Costas, the journalists traveled to Europe, interviewed drivers across the country, surveilled Super Ego facilities and reviewed legal depositions — all before airing a single frame.
“One of the things that I started looking at when people started asking that question — and throughout this process of working with Ashley, Eliza, and the rest of their team — was how meticulous that whole CBS team actually is,” Carpenter told FreightWaves. “They are really trying to get the story right before it goes out.”
The pace stood in stark contrast to the news cycle Carpenter had grown accustomed to.
“I think even as a writer sometimes I’ll rush things because it’s the narrative driver for the moment, and I’ll rush to get it out because that’s what everybody’s talking about right now,” he said. “With this CBS group, they had no sense of urgency. They simply wanted to make sure — even if it meant they had to go to Europe, fly around the country interviewing drivers, surveilling these Super Ego facilities, pulling legal depositions, and really reviewing everything — that they presented a true and accurate representation of the Super Ego model and how it’s indicative of being a chameleon carrier.”
The production scale was massive for those 15 minutes of airtime. Carpenter alone contributed six hours of footage — a four-hour sit-down interview with Whitaker plus two hours of driving with camera crews. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Administrator Derek Barrs sat for a three-hour interview. Behind the scenes, the team reviewed what Carpenter estimates were tens of thousands of documents, possibly reaching into the hundreds of thousands when counting depositions from Super Ego-related civil cases.
“There’s probably tens of thousands of documents that were reviewed, if not more — into the hundreds of thousands, especially when you start considering depositions from different cases of Super Ego and their respective companies,” Carpenter said. “Just the expert witness cases that I work on for Super Ego-related wrongful death or civil cases, I think we’re up to six that we’re involved with now.”
The broadcast’s impact was felt immediately. Since the episode aired, four additional attorneys working on Super Ego cases have contacted Carpenter about additional suits.
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.
Case Study: Super Ego Holding
Super Ego-connected carriers have logged nearly 15,000 safety violations and 500 accidents over the past two years, according to Department of Transportation data cited in the investigation. The network spans from Serbia to the U.S., with hubs in Elmhurst, Illinois, and Jacksonville, Florida, and customers as large as Amazon, Walmart, Costco and the United States Postal Service.
Driver Daniel Sanchez had been driving commercial rigs for eight years when he was recruited by Super Ego in 2025. The company’s flashy recruitment campaigns promised earnings of $8,000 to $12,000 per week.
“They promise you the world,” Sanchez said during the broadcast. “They say you can make 8 to 10, $12,000 a week.”
The reality was far different.
“Not at all,” Sanchez said when asked if Super Ego lived up to those promises. “I was coming home with negative — negative amounts in my check. I was doin’ around 6 to 800 miles a day with that company with zero.”
The “60 Minutes” investigation documented how drivers were instructed to physically alter their trucks to hide the chameleon scheme.
“They’d email you or they’d send you some kind of documentation with a picture of the new name and DOT number,” Sanchez said. “They’d have me print it out, buy some duct tape. Come out, put it on the truck.”
The hours-of-service violations were equally brazen. After drivers logged 11 hours behind the wheel — the legal limit — managers back in Serbia would illegally reset federally mandated time clocks remotely to give drivers fresh hours.
“By the push of a button, I guess, somehow somewhere they have control of the app where they can just reset your time. Just make it go away,” Sanchez said. “There’s been a time where I drove — I was driving for 18 hours. And I told ‘em. I said, ‘I’m done. I’m going to sleep and parking.’ The text message said we don’t care about that, ‘they’re not payin’ for you to do anything but use the restroom and drive.’”
A whistleblower — a former employee of a Super Ego-affiliated company based in Serbia — confirmed that taking money from drivers became a competitive sport within the company. During one pay period, the top dispatcher cut nearly $24,000, or 32% of drivers’ pay.
What Didn’t Make the Cut
The broadcast couldn’t include everything. One significant segment left on the cutting room floor involved GenLog analysis of Sanchez’s employment history — visual proof of the chameleon scheme in action.
“You can actually see that in the GenLog snapshots,” Carpenter said. “We see him one day when he starts with one carrier and their marking, and then you can see it float throughout his employment history with them. Even though he never changed dispatchers or VIN or license plate or anything, he just changed markings six different times while he still works for the same company.”
The footage remains available on Carpenter’s website, showing the same driver, same truck, same electronic logging device system — with six different door markings over the course of a year.
Technology Fighting Back
Carpenter has channeled his investigative work into THE TEA Highway Intelligence & Risk Platform, a technology platform at theteaintel.com that merges approximately 100 datasets and 35 integrations — including FBI data, census data, corporate filings and UCC records — to cross-reference companies seeking new operating authority.
“When you have someone applying for an OP-1 application who doesn’t have any history in trucking, there are systems out there now that can cross-reference business profiles to see if there are any red flags that they need to look at before they actually give them a license,” Carpenter said.
The FMCSA is evaluating adoption of these new types of systems.
Looking Ahead
The regulatory landscape is shifting faster than at any point in recent memory. Barrs, who took over as FMCSA administrator in October, has prioritized what he calls the “front door problem” — stopping bad actors before they enter the system. A new registration system will replace 40-year-old technology this year, and the agency is actively hiring 40 additional investigators to supplement its current force of 350 overseeing all 700,000 carriers.
The challenge extends beyond FMCSA’s walls. Cross-departmental cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and FBI is essential but slow.
“FMCSA is an enforcement agency, not an investigative agency,” Carpenter said. “While they do some investigations, they rely heavily on DOJ and FBI.”Between new technology partnerships with Modus and Idemia, private sector data tools and renewed enforcement focus, Carpenter believes the current administration is doing more than any predecessor. But he urged patience from an industry demanding immediate action.
“The wheels of government don’t always turn as fast as you want them to. There are guardrails there. There are rulemaking procedures that people have to consider,” he said. “It didn’t get broken immediately. It’s not going to get fixed immediately. But you’re on the right track more now than you’ve ever been. Just know that the wheels are turning.”
