Carrier red flags: the 21 risk signals we check
This is the whole rule set. Not a summary of it, not a marketing version of it — the actual list CarrierVet runs against FMCSA data every time you vet a carrier. 5 of the rules are critical: any one of them, on its own, forces a High risk level. The other 16 are weighted, and two points is all it takes to move a carrier off Low.
We publish it because a risk score you cannot audit is a risk score you should not trust. If the panel calls a carrier High, you are entitled to know exactly which line of the FMCSA record did it.
How the risk level is computed
There is no neural net here and no black-box score out of 100. It is a rule engine, and it runs in one pass:
- Any single critical finding forces High. The weighted rules are still listed on the profile, but they no longer change the level. One critical is enough.
- Otherwise, the weighted findings are added up. Most weighted rules carry 2 points; the softer ones carry 1.
- A total of 2 or more is Medium. Below 2 is Low. So one 2-point finding lands a carrier at Medium by itself, and so do two 1-point findings.
That is the entire model. It means a Medium can be triggered by a single shared phone number, and it means a carrier with two mild findings and a carrier with one serious finding land in the same bucket. Read the factors, not just the badge.
Any one of these stops the booking
These are not judgment calls. Each one means the carrier cannot legally or safely haul your freight today. There is no weighing, no adding up and no combination of good news that offsets them.
Not allowed to operate per FMCSA
FMCSA has this entity flagged as not authorized to operate. There is no version of this that ends well.
No active operating authority
Neither common nor contract authority is active. If they move your freight, you are the one holding the liability.
Active out-of-service order
FMCSA has ordered the carrier off the road. The panel shows the date the order took effect.
Unsatisfactory safety rating
The worst rating FMCSA issues. Most shipper contracts and most cargo policies exclude it outright.
Insurance on file below the amount required
The filed BIPD coverage is less than what this carrier's authority requires. A claim could land on you.
A High carrier is not necessarily a criminal. Authority lapses for unpaid fees. Insurance filings lag. The point of the flag is that you stop and verify before the truck is loaded — not that you blacklist anyone.
The 16 weighted signals
None of these disqualifies a carrier by itself. Each one is a question you should be able to answer before you dispatch. The 2-point rules are the ones that reach Medium on their own — they map to the patterns that show up again and again in fraud and in serious safety failures.
Authority granted less than 6 months ago
New authority isn't disqualifying on its own — but it's the single most common trait of a fraudulent MC.
New authority with an unusually large fleet
Under 6 months old with 20+ power units. Legitimate fleets don't materialize at that size. This is the classic reincarnated-carrier signature.
Phone number shared with 3+ other carriers
One phone number behind several MCs is how a single bad actor operates a stable of shells.
Email address shared with 3+ other carriers
Same pattern as the phone. FMCSA records make it visible; almost nobody checks.
Address shared with 10+ other carriers
Sometimes a legitimate filing agent or a truck park. Sometimes a mail drop with a dozen MCs behind it.
Authority revoked in the last 36 months
Revoked and then reinstated. Worth understanding why before you hand over a load.
2+ insurance cancellations in the last 36 months
Insurers cancel for non-payment and for loss history. Neither is a good sign. Insurer swaps are excluded from this count.
Conditional safety rating
FMCSA found the carrier's safety management controls inadequate.
A BASIC score at or above the 85th percentile
Ranked against peer carriers with a comparable inspection count. Higher is worse.
A BASIC violation rate 2× the national average
The fallback when no percentile is available. Needs at least 5 inspections to trigger.
BASIC scores over the FMCSA intervention threshold
FMCSA itself considers this carrier worth intervening on.
Driver out-of-service rate above ~5%
The national average is roughly 5%. Above it means drivers are being pulled off the road more often than the norm.
Vehicle out-of-service rate above ~20%
The national average is roughly 20%. Above it points to deferred maintenance.
Fatal crashes in the last 24 months
Fault isn't recorded in the FMCSA data, so this is a prompt to ask — not a verdict.
No inspection history despite significant reported mileage
A carrier claiming six-figure mileage with zero inspections either isn't running the miles it claims, or isn't running them under this MC.
Also holds broker authority
Not a red flag by itself — but confirm the truck is actually theirs and the load isn't quietly being re-brokered.
FMCSA stopped publishing property-carrier SMS percentiles in 2017. The percentiles CarrierVet shows are computed from FMCSA's public inspection and violation files against peer carriers with a similar inspection count. They approximate FMCSA's methodology — they are not the official score, and the panel labels them as such.
All 21 rules run on every lookup. Free.
Highlight an MC or DOT number in Gmail or Outlook on the web, click the badge, and the side panel comes back with the level and the exact factors behind it. Anywhere else, right-click the number instead. No account, no credit card, no seat limit.
Works in Gmail and Outlook on the web. Right-click lookup anywhere else.
The chameleon carrier, and why the record still betrays it
A chameleon carrier — the industry also says reincarnated carrier — is an operator who was shut down and came back wearing a new number. FMCSA revokes the authority, or an unsatisfactory rating makes the MC unusable, or the safety history gets bad enough that no broker will touch it. So the operator files for a fresh MC. New entity name, new paperwork, no history.
The trap is that the new MC looks good. Zero crashes. No out-of-service orders. No violations. Not because the operator is safe, but because the record is three weeks old. A vetting process that only asks "are there any black marks?" will wave a chameleon straight through, every time. The absence of a bad record is not a good record.
What carries over
The reason this is catchable at all is that reincarnation is expensive to do properly, and almost nobody does it properly. A new MC is cheap. A new phone number, a new email, a new yard, a new dispatcher and a new set of trucks are not. So the operator refiles with the same details as before, and the FMCSA record — which is public — quietly links the old entity to the new one:
- The phone number. The dispatch line does not change. Now it appears on the filing of the dead MC and the fresh one.
- The email address. Same, and often worse — one inbox behind an entire stable of shells.
- The address. The yard is the yard. Ten-plus MCs at one address is sometimes a filing agent and sometimes a mail drop with a dozen ghosts behind it.
- The fleet. This is the tell that cannot be faked. A four-month-old authority does not have thirty power units. Legitimate fleets are built truck by truck over years. A brand-new MC with a large fleet is a fleet that already existed under a different number.
- The mileage with no inspections. A carrier reporting six-figure annual miles and zero inspections is either inflating the miles or running them under someone else's authority.
Which rules catch it
No single rule on this page says "chameleon carrier" — that would be a guess, and we do not ship guesses. What the engine does instead is surface the individual facts that a chameleon cannot avoid leaving behind. These are the ones that fire:
- New authority with an unusually large fleet2 pts
- Phone number shared with 3+ other carriers2 pts
- Email address shared with 3+ other carriers2 pts
- Address shared with 10+ other carriers1 pt
- Authority granted less than 6 months ago1 pt
- No inspection history despite significant reported mileage1 pt
Count the points. A textbook chameleon — new authority, twenty-plus trucks, a phone shared with the carriers it used to be — is at Medium on the fleet rule alone, and well past it once the shared contact details land. What the engine cannot do is tell you which dead MC this one used to be. The revocation rule reads the authority history of the docket you looked up, and a freshly-filed docket has none; the only thread we can pull between two carriers is a shared phone, email or address. The badge goes yellow and the factor list tells you precisely why, which is the part you can act on.
What you do next is a phone call. Not to the number in the email — to the number on the FMCSA record. If the person who answers cannot explain why a four-month-old company owns thirty trucks, you have your answer. The same setup is the engine behind most double-brokering schemes, which is worth understanding separately.
What a risk level is, and what it is not
A risk level is a prompt to ask a question. That is the whole job. It reads a public record faster than you can and it tells you where the soft spots are. It does not know the carrier, it has never spoken to the carrier, and it cannot see the things that actually decide whether you get your freight delivered.
It is not, and was never designed to be:
- A substitute for a signed carrier packet. The contract is what makes the relationship enforceable. A green badge is not a contract.
- A substitute for a certificate of insurance. We read what the insurer filed with FMCSA. You still want the COI, sent by the agent, naming you.
- A substitute for a phone call to the number on the FMCSA record — not the number in the email signature. That one call defeats a large share of impersonation attempts, because the impostor does not control the real carrier's phone.
Low is not a guarantee
Low means no critical rule fired and the weighted findings did not add up to 2 points. It does not mean the record came back clean — a Low carrier can still be carrying a single 1-point flag, and the panel lists it underneath the badge. Read it. And Low certainly does not mean the carrier is honest, solvent, or going to show up. A carrier with active authority, adequate insurance and a clean inspection history can still no-show your load, and an impostor emailing you from a lookalike domain while impersonating a genuinely low-risk carrier will produce a genuinely low-risk profile. You are vetting an MC number. You are not vetting the person who typed it.
And a good carrier can be flagged
This cuts the other way too, and we would rather say so here than have you discover it on a carrier you have hauled with for six years:
- Shared address. Filing agents and compliance services file for hundreds of carriers from one address. That is the address rule firing on an entirely honest carrier.
- Insurance cancellations. Switching insurers produces a cancellation record. We exclude clean insurer swaps, but the FMCSA data is messy and some legitimate changes still land in the count.
- New authority. Every carrier is new once. A twenty-year owner-operator who finally went out on his own has a six-week-old MC and a perfectly good reason for it.
- Fatal crashes. FMCSA does not record fault. A carrier that was rear-ended carries the same entry as one that caused it.
So the level is a place to start, not a verdict to hide behind. The factor list exists precisely so you can look at the reason, decide it does not apply, and book the load anyway. A broker who understands why the badge is yellow is worth more than a broker who only reads the color.
Spot-checking one carrier at a time has a limit
CarrierVet is free and it will stay free, and for a lot of brokerages it is genuinely enough. But it only runs when you remember to run it. A posted load pulls dozens of carrier replies, and the one you do not check is the one that matters. Every rule on this page depends on a human deciding to highlight a number.
The paid Keelway platform vets every inbound carrier email automatically, before you read it — the replies arrive already scored and ranked, and a risky carrier is flagged in the thread rather than waiting for you to look. Fraud Shield adds the deeper identity checks on top. That is a different product with a price on it, and this page is not the place to sell it — the honest summary is that the extension is the right tool for spot checks and the platform is the right tool for volume.
Where these signals come from
Every rule on this page reads public FMCSA data. Operating authority, safety rating, crash history and the insurance filings come from the QCMobile API and the Licensing & Insurance system, queried live on each lookup and cached for 24 hours. Contact details, fleet size and reported mileage come from the FMCSA Company Census, which we refresh monthly. The BASIC percentiles are recomputed monthly from FMCSA's public inspection and violation files.
Nothing here is scraped from a private database, and none of it is crowd-sourced. If you want to check our work on a specific carrier, the panel links straight to the FMCSA record it read.
Frequently asked questions
What is a chameleon carrier?+
What is the difference between a critical and a weighted red flag?+
Does a High risk level mean the carrier is committing fraud?+
Can a legitimate carrier get flagged?+
Are the BASIC percentiles the official FMCSA scores?+
How current is the data behind these signals?+
Does CarrierVet cost anything?+
Related
The end-to-end process these signals plug into — from the first email to a signed packet.
The scheme most chameleon carriers exist to run, and the record that gives it away.
Vet a carrier from Gmail or Outlook on the web without leaving the thread. No account required.
Check authority, insurance and safety for any carrier, straight from the browser.
Run these checks on every inbound carrier reply automatically, before you read it.
What CarrierVet reads, what it never stores, and where the data lives.