Catch the carrier that came back from the dead.
A reincarnated carrier shuts down under one DOT number and re-registers under a new one, leaving its crash history, violations, and unpaid claims behind. FleetRize finds the family resemblance before you fund it.
What is a reincarnated carrier?
Reincarnated carriers, also known as chameleon carriers in federal literature, shut down their operating authority under one DOT number and re-register under a new one, often to escape a poor safety record, unpaid judgments, or an open investigation. The trucks, the officers, and the risk stay the same. Only the number changes.
Regulators have tracked the pattern for over a decade, and it has only become more visible since. Federal auditors have measured how fast it grows and how much riskier it is than ordinary new-entrant risk.
Carriers matching the reincarnation pattern identified by federal auditors, 2005 to 2010.
Share of those carriers later involved in a severe crash, versus other new entrants: three times the rate.
Violations spread across one reincarnating carrier network, exposed in a national television investigation.
FMCSA's identity-proofed registration rollout, built specifically to make reincarnation harder to pull off.
Average annual cargo theft and fraud losses for a single motor carrier. Logistics providers average $1.84M.
How Reincarnation Detection works.
Not a sequence of steps: three aspects of the same identity graph, running on every application.
Map
Every application is checked for shared addresses, phones, names, officers, and vehicles across DOT numbers. The biggest telltale: the same trucks showing up in inspections under different DOT numbers.
Score
Each match adds points: a shared business address, a near-identical name, an active reincarnation pattern, an address the mail bounces from. The total is a 0 to 10 score with bands you can act on.
Prove
The related-entity graph shows every link, and one click exports the evidence as a PDF for your file.
Fraud signals, not false alarms.
Many carriers share an address or phone for ordinary reasons, like a permitting service or a process agent. FleetRize does not just flag the overlap. It shows every factor and its weight so a person can tell a real red flag from a paperwork coincidence.
A shared mailbox and a shared terminal look nothing alike once you can see the factors.
The pattern doesn’t stop watching after intake.
Reincarnation risk isn’t intake-only. If a carrier’s band changes, its score jumps, a new related DOT appears, or the reincarnation flag flips, that’s a task in your queue the next morning.
See Reincarnation Detection on a carrier you know.
Your first ten carriers are free. Pull a DOT number you have always wondered about and read its family tree.