Vet

Catch what a clean lookup misses

Reincarnated authorities, rented MC numbers, insurance lapses, safety against peers. The whole federal record on any carrier, read for you, with no account and no card.

Free on any carrier. No account, no card.

The carrier report

Everything on a carrier, in one report

Authority, insurance, inspections, safety history, ownership. Everything you check when you vet a carrier, pulled into one place and stated as facts.

The fleetfax carrier report header: carrier name with a Carrier tag, USDOT and MC numbers, the date the official data was read with a Refresh control and links to the MOTUS and SAFER records, then a verdict card reading 2 cautions found, naming trucks also operated under other carriers and an authority previously revoked or inactive, and a row of cards: authority active for 10 years 5 months, $1,000,000 liability in force, rated Satisfactory, 38 power units observed in inspections, and fewer crashes per mile than about 65% of peers.

The top of a report. The verdict comes first, then the record behind it: authority, insurance on file, safety against peers, and the trucks actually seen on the road. Cautions are named, not scored, and each one opens to the filing it came from. The line under the name says when the official data was read, and links straight to it. An illustrative composite: the carrier is fictional, its DOT number is unissued, and every figure in frame was authored for this image. The same report is free on any carrier.

Risk flags

Fraud patterns caught in every report

Freight fraud usually leaves a paper trail in the federal record. fleetfax looks for the patterns brokers get burned by and raises them as cautions, so you make the call with them in front of you. A few of the things it watches for:

Reincarnation pattern Caution

A prior authority at the same address and ownership closed with unresolved issues shortly before this one opened. Often a way to shed a bad record.

MC-for-rent pattern Caution

Authority holder and the operator on inspections do not line up, a signal the number may be rented out to unrelated trucks.

Recent authority churn Caution

Authority granted, revoked and reinstated in a short window, a record that tends to move around more than a settled carrier's.

The fraud playbook

How stolen loads actually start

These plays start at a desk, not a truck stop. The thief books the load as somebody else, or as a company built to be burned, and the freight is gone before anyone knows to look. Each play leaves marks in the federal record. Here's where the report puts them in front of you.

Carrier impersonation

A fraudster picks a real carrier with a clean record and books as them, from a lookalike email domain, with a phone number that rings at the thief's desk. The paperwork gets signed under the stolen name and the load disappears.

In the reportThe carrier's contact details as filed on the federal record, so your callback goes to the number the carrier filed, not the number in the email.

Chameleon reopenings

A carrier shut down for cause reopens under a new USDOT number with a spotless face, sometimes at the same address, under the same people. Weeks of clean, small loads build trust before the high-value freight gets diverted.

In the reportThe reincarnation caution connects the new number to the closed one. We published the data on how often the official disclosure field misses these.

The holiday bust-out

Theft rings time the play for long weekends: loads staged early, skeleton crews at the dock, and days before a receiver notices anything is missing. A carrier that looked fine at onboarding months ago is exactly what the play counts on.

In the reportThe record as it stands the day you pull it, with new and churning authority flagged. The report is free, so checking again costs nothing.

Peer safety percentiles

Measured against carriers with a similar record

Ten violations mean one thing at five hundred inspections and another at twelve. fleetfax compares each carrier against others with a similar inspection record.

The fleetfax report view of FMCSA BASIC percentiles for a carrier: a summary strip reading all BASICs within threshold with the crash rate per million miles against the federal benchmark, the vehicle out-of-service rate against the national rate, and a Satisfactory safety rating; then one row per category, hours of service at the 8th percentile, crash rate 32nd, vehicle maintenance 35th, unsafe driving 2nd, hazmat not scored. Each row carries its violation count and the inspections behind it.

Every carrier gets a percentile. Each one is grouped with carriers with a similar amount of inspection activity, then ranked on violations per inspection from the public record. The comparison pool is carriers that also had recent violations, and each row says so; crash rate is its own pool, measured per mile against carriers that also had recordable crashes. The status column is shorthand for where that percentile sits against FMCSA's alert threshold. A higher percentile means more violations than peers, not a pass or a fail. FMCSA keeps its own percentiles hidden, so these are fleetfax estimates built from the same public records, not official CSA scores.

Authority & insurance history

Every filing and lapse, going back years

Not just today's snapshot. The full run of authority events and insurance filings, side by side, so a gap that closed two years ago still shows.

The fleetfax authority and insurance view for a carrier under an out-of-service order: common authority inactive, out-of-service date March 16, 2026, no liability insurance on file; below it the authority history, granted December 3, 2025 and revoked March 2, 2026, and the insurance history, a $750K liability policy cancelled in February 2026 with no replacement on file.

Granted in December, revoked by March. An authority barely three months old, next to the insurance ledger that explains it: a $750K policy cancelled with no replacement on file. A packet from onboarding would still say this carrier was covered; the report shows the record as it stands today.

Insurance, live-verified against Motus

Every night, fleetfax checks unclear insurance records against FMCSA's Motus system, the registration system of record. When the public feeds lag, fleetfax corrects the insurance record to match what Motus shows.

Read the research

Observed fleet

The trucks actually seen on the road

Counted from roadside inspections, next to the number the carrier reports.

The fleetfax fleet check flagged 'Running more than registered': the carrier reports 2 power units while 469 distinct power units were seen in inspections over 24 months, and 873 units including trailers were first seen in the last 6 months.

2 reported, 469 observed. This carrier reports 2 power units to FMCSA; inspections saw 469 distinct trucks in 24 months, so the report flags it. Reported and observed are two separate facts, and not every truck gets inspected, so a gap is a reason to ask the carrier, not proof of anything by itself.

The fleetfax Fleet tab observed-equipment table: each row is one truck or trailer seen in a roadside inspection, with its VIN and the make, model, year, and class decoded from it, plus when it was last seen.

Decoded from roadside-inspection VINs. Each row is one truck or trailer seen in an inspection, with the VIN it was read from and the make, year, and class decoded from it. The carrier and VINs shown are fictional.

Operating map

Where a carrier was observed

Built from where the carrier's trucks have actually been inspected, not from a service area somebody filled in on a form.

The fleetfax operating map for a regional carrier: 356 roadside inspections across 176 counties in 17 states, most active in Alabama, Florida and Texas, with equipment types seen at the roadside; below it the map, 300 mapped inspections clustered along I-10, I-20, I-59, I-65, I-75 and I-85, recency-graded dots, a ringed domicile marker in Abbeville, AL, and an activity-over-time histogram.

176 counties, 300 mapped inspections. A regional carrier that works the Southeast and stays there. Every dot is a roadside inspection, placed where the truck was actually stopped; the dashed lines are the corridors those stops keep landing on, and the ringed marker is the carrier's registered home base.

The report views on this page are illustrative composites, made in August 2026: the real report, rendered against carriers and figures authored for the images. Carrier names are fictional and their USDOT numbers unissued. The federal record moves daily, so the live report on any carrier will differ.

Beyond one report

Vetting one carrier is the easy part

The report stays free on every carrier. A free account lets you hold any carrier you open to your own minimums. Pro is for the days you're running a whole book.

Policy

Build your qualification rules from 17 checks over the federal record, with your thresholds and your grading on each one. Open a carrier and see whether it meets your minimums, and which rule says so. Where the record can't settle a rule, it says so instead of guessing. These are your minimums, not a fleetfax grade. Writing a policy and reading one carrier against it, rule by rule, costs nothing; running it across your whole book is the Pro part.

Every rule reads one field of the federal record directly. The numbers are yours, and so is the grading. fleetfax reports the facts against your line and never adds a verdict of its own. An illustrative composite: the rule set shown was authored for this image.

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