How an Uzbek truck driver’s fatal crash exposed troubling fraud trend in Middle America: ‘Chameleon carriers’

Death of Ohio college soccer player puts trucking oversight and CDL fraud in national spotlight

CINCINNATI — The death of a 21-year-old Ohio soccer player in a highway crash has focused national attention on the safety of America’s freight corridors, the licensing of commercial truck drivers and whether regulators are closing gaps in an industry that moves most of the country’s goods.

Tobias “Toby” Forsythe, a goalkeeper for the University of Massachusetts Lowell men’s soccer team, was killed on July 5 when a semi-truck struck the rear of his Honda Accord on Interstate 71 in Madison County, authorities said. The driver, 42-year-old Bekhzod Asrarov, a national of Uzbekistan, had entered the United States through the federal Diversity Visa lottery program during the Biden administration, court filings show.

The crash quickly raised a basic question: whether the driver of an 80,000-pound rig can read road signs, understand federal rules and communicate with law enforcement in an emergency. Court records say Asrarov held an Ohio commercial driver’s license but could not speak or understand English well enough to talk with responding troopers without using Google Translate. Records also say he allegedly removed a dashboard camera from his truck after the crash in an effort to conceal or destroy evidence.

The U.S. transportation secretary said in a social media post, “We cannot let truckers like Asrarov, who can’t read our road signs or speak to law enforcement, drive 80,000-pound rigs on America’s highways.”

Forsythe’s death is one of several recent fatal crashes involving truck drivers with immigration or licensing problems that has sharpened debate over commercial driver’s license fraud, immigration enforcement and oversight of the trucking industry.

In southwest Ohio, the concern has taken on a local focus. An online researcher who uses the name Nodawolf and asked for anonymity because of death threats has spent months tracing what he described as an interconnected web of trucking companies, many of them owned or operated by people from Uzbekistan, in and around Loveland, Middletown and Maineville, the community where Asrarov lives.

“All of them have English violations and have manipulated ELDs,” Nodawolf said, referring to electronic logging devices used to track how long drivers stay behind the wheel. Federal rules limit drivers’ hours to reduce fatigue.

“This really concerns me, you know, as a father,” he said. “I mean, it's clearly obvious that they either don't understand our laws, they don't care about our laws, or they know our laws and they're taking advantage of it.”

Some of the companies identified in the research have donated to a local Islamic center in Maineville, according to the center’s website. The center said a charitable contribution or participation in a community fundraising activity “by itself, should not be interpreted as evidence of an ownership, employment, contractual, commercial, or other business relationship with the Islamic Center or its leadership.”

A separate review of business registrations identified hundreds of trucking companies and related entities in Maineville and nearby communities, including dozens registered in recent years. A look at companies identified as connected to the local Uzbek community found serious federal motor carrier safety violations, including citations against drivers who did not meet English-proficiency standards and other federal trucking violations.

Nodawolf also has reported on a Telegram channel, named “UzbegimAmerica,” that regularly references the Uzbek community in Maineville. Court documents describe the channel’s owner, Farkhod Faiziev, as a suspected unlawful immigrant from Uzbekistan.

Industry experts say the structure of some operations can make enforcement harder. A veteran of the trucking business, who spoke on condition of anonymity for safety, described a scheme known in some circles as “chameleon carriers”: groups of companies that appear separate on paper but use the same drivers, trucks and management.

The veteran said an operator may start with one legitimate company, then create additional carriers and move the same equipment among them. The result, he said, is to spread safety problems across several firms so that no single company’s record is so bad that regulators shut it down.

“If they have 10 inspections and 10 violations across 10 different companies, that doesn’t hurt the safety rating as much,” he said. “But if it was one company that had 10 inspections and 10 violations, that one company is going to get hammered.”

The same structure can also act as a backup plan. If one company loses insurance, is suspended or develops a bad safety record, the drivers and trucks can be moved to another entity, the veteran said. He said the arrangement can also create opportunities for cargo theft, with a shell company disappearing after obtaining a valuable load while the wider network continues operating.

Such operations can be further obscured when drivers are hired as independent contractors rather than employees, the veteran said, a classification that can bypass the standard federal employment-eligibility checks many companies use.

Federal agencies have said the issues go beyond one state. The Departments of Homeland Security, Transportation and Justice recently announced a coordinated effort targeting commercial driver’s license fraud, including false licensing, unauthorized employment, identity-document fraud and shell companies. The effort includes inspections at more than 200 driving schools in 23 states, investigations based on more than 1,000 leads, enforcement aimed at people without work authorization who hold commercial licenses and a new multi-state Justice Department task force.

The federal government also has acted in specific cases. Earlier this month, a multi-agency operation in the Yuma Sector of Arizona led to the arrest of 95 truck drivers who were in the country without authorization. ICE last month launched a tip line for reporting fraudulent commercial driver’s licenses, and immigration officials said in September they had arrested two Uzbek drivers in New Jersey as part of the broader crackdown.

The scrutiny has reached Ohio driving schools. Seven of the schools targeted by the Department of Transportation last month are in Ohio. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has also issued a notice of proposed removal for Turan CDL School, a Middletown-based company that advertised CDL training to Uzbek speakers. Some of its advertisements suggested students could obtain a commercial license without first learning English, and online reviews claimed some customers earned licenses in as little as a week.

“There's 'what do the rules say' and then 'what's happening on the ground," Andrew Poliakoff, vice president of the Commercial Vehicle Training Association, said shortly after Forsythe’s death. “We're seeing now is that there are a lot of people committing fraud, and engaging in a variety of bad actions issuing commercial driver's licenses.”

Industry operators also say a separate trend is raising alarm: the growth of “non-domiciled” drivers, foreign drivers who hold a U.S. commercial license issued by a state where they do not permanently live.

Victor Louis, whose Cincinnati company Load Secure checks the identities of drivers entering its network, said about 15% to 20% of drivers entering the company’s network fall into that category. He estimated a similar share nationwide among long-haul truckers.

“Trucking is such an inherently dangerous activity. Essentially, you’re driving a 40-ton missile down the road,” Louis said. “To think that someone is going to be certified to do that within a week, that may or may not speak English, like that doesn’t make any sense.”

Louis said long-haul work can attract drivers who do not want to maintain a permanent home because the job can keep them on the road for weeks. He said those drivers are also more likely, in his view, to be involved in cargo theft.

“Whether they’re here legally or not, I don’t know, but they are essentially foreign nationals,” he said. “What we see with that market of non-domiciled drivers is a high propensity of cargo theft, an extremely high propensity. It’s wreaking havoc on our supply chain.”

Ohio’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles said it is reviewing its nondomiciled commercial driver’s license holders with the federal agency. Of about 5,000 such credentials originally issued, about 3,500 remain active, the bureau said, with roughly 1,500 no longer active as the review continues.

The risk of these gaps was made stark again on Sept. 2 in Brown County, where a semi-truck crashed head-on into the car of Brenda Watson, 50, killing her. The driver, Manjit Singh, an Indian national holding a California commercial license, later was found to be in the country without authorization, ICE said. A federal detainer was placed on him, and he was charged with aggravated vehicular homicide.

The crash has turned licensing, immigration enforcement and company oversight from back-office compliance issues into questions about who is accountable when a trucker cannot read the signs, cannot talk to troopers or belongs to a web of shell companies that regulators may struggle to untangle. For the communities in southwest Ohio, the question is no longer hypothetical.