Glossary
Reincarnated (chameleon) carrier
A reincarnated carrier (the federal literature says "chameleon carrier") is an operation that exits one registration and reappears under a new one, leaving behind a safety record, an out-of-service order, unpaid fines, or a revoked authority. The trucks, people, and customers continue; only the USDOT number is new.
How the pattern shows up in public data
A reincarnation has to reuse something: an address, a phone number, an officer, equipment. Those overlaps are visible across the federal registration corpus if you look for them, which is precisely the kind of cross-carrier reading a single-carrier lookup never does. The suggestive combination is a young authority plus connections to a revoked predecessor, sometimes plus a fleet claim with no inspection trail behind it.
How fleetfax handles it
fleetfax checks every carrier against the registration corpus and raises the overlaps it finds: an officer shared with a revoked carrier, equipment observed under multiple authorities, prior revocations, and new authority context. These are descriptive findings, not accusations: legitimate explanations exist (a sold business, a family of companies, a shared yard), which is why the report names the specific connection and lets you ask the carrier the obvious question.
Related terms
New entrant (new authority)
A carrier in its first stretch of federal registration. New interstate carriers enter an 18-month monitoring period with a required safety audit; a young authority is a fact worth knowing, not a verdict.
Operating authority
FMCSA's grant of legal permission to operate for hire: common, contract, or broker. Active, inactive, pending, revoked, and the gaps in between.
Double brokering
Re-brokering a load to another carrier without the original broker's or shipper's knowledge. The freight moves under a carrier nobody vetted and payment chains break; it's the load-board era's defining fraud pattern.
fleetfax reads public FMCSA data and is not affiliated with FMCSA or the U.S. Department of Transportation. This page explains terminology; it is not legal advice.