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Sep 13, 2025, 9:32 AM (7 days ago) |
We must never forget
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In the hours following the horrific killing of 31-year-old conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Wednesday, several of his old tweets began circulating on X. One in particular from June of this year is worth meditating on as the country grapples with this tragedy, how we got to this point, and where we go from here.
“When things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it’s important to stay grounded,” Kirk wrote on June 17. “Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends, and remember internet fury is not real life. It’s going to be ok.”
(Reminds me of the CBS early 1950s TV show “Racket Squad” which focused on confidence games and always ending their show with the line, “They will pat you on the back with one hand and pick your pocket with the other.”)
How Bitcoin ATMs Are Helping Scammers Steal Millions
As cryptocurrency machines spread across the country, gas station employees are becoming the unlikely last line of defense against crypto fraud.
Sam Blum
Last month, Avalon Hardy, a gas station clerk at a Stinker Store in Boise, Idaho, noticed something strange. Over the course of a week, three elderly women walked cautiously into the store and headed to a lonely Bitcoin ATM by the front door. The women were always distressed and either talking on the phone or texting with someone who claimed to be owed money that could be paid only with Bitcoin.
The image was disquieting: An old woman, vexed by an unfamiliar machine that took cash deposits and converted it into untraceable cryptocurrency. On all three occasions, the women were carrying bags full of cash. Hardy, noticing all the makings of a scam, decided to intervene. At first, she wasn’t obtrusive. She adopted a boilerplate script: “Do you know where you’re sending the money to?” she’d ask. “You don’t have to be on the phone to send money, as long as you have the other person’s information,” she informed them. Finally, when one 79-year-old victim was adamant about depositing her $15,000, Hardy unplugged the ATM. A week later, Hardy stopped another 75-year-old from losing $19,000.
After Hardy talked to the local cops, she learned that the women were victims of a widespread crypto scam enabled by the proliferation of Bitcoin ATMs, otherwise known as BTMs. There are roughly 30,000 BTMs, mainly run by two major companies Bitcoin Depot and CoinFlip, operating in convenience stores and gas stations across the country. The Stinker Store where Hardy worked hosted a machine from Bitcoin Depot, adding a dose of newfangled finance to the stations’ usual offerings of fuel pumps and fountain sodas, but they’ve also provided a convenient conduit for financial crimes. They turn cash into untraceable digital currencies, which can be transferred to any number of cryptowallets, or perhaps cashed out at an offshore exchange.
The BTM scams usually follow a similar blueprint. First, the scammer messages their mark, often impersonating a government worker or claiming they work for a recognizable company like Microsoft. They claim that they’re collecting on an overdue bill, and tell their victim to pay in Bitcoin, guiding them to a nearby BTM. Sometimes, the social engineering component becomes more sinister, with thieves doctoring fake arrest warrants using AI, Matthew Hogan, a crypto crime specialist with the Connecticut State Police, tells Inc.
“They’ll email you an arrest warrant. And you can tell, once we look at it, obviously, it’s Adobe [Photoshop], but they’ve used AI to enhance it. They’ll take the DOJ logo and throw it on there. They’ll manipulate signatures,” he explains. The end result has all the hallmarks of pulpy true crime, or a suburban nightmare.
All told, Hardy says she’s stopped around seven crypto scams from taking place in her store since she started working there last September. She isn’t the only clerk who’s risen to the occasion: Stephanie Martinez, who works at a different Stinker Store outpost in greater Boise, stopped an elderly victim from depositing $10,000 into a different BTM in July.
“People stopping and disrupting these scams is the best way that we have to really affect it,” says Brad Thorne, a financial crimes detective with the Boise Police Department. “It’s much easier to stop it before it starts.”
Thorne says he briefed Stinker Stores’ leadership on the issue in an effort to increase awareness of the scams. Hardy says that no official training was provided by Stinker Stores to employees on spotting BTM scams. Stinker Stores, which operates gas stations across Idaho, Colorado, and Wyoming, didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Even so, vigilant gas station clerks alone can’t provide the bulwark needed to clamp down on a sprawling criminal enterprise. Even as the crypto industry enjoys a mainstream resurgence under the Trump administration, BTM scams are tearing through the country from Arizona to Florida. During the first half of 2024, scammers stole $65 million from Americans via BTMs, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
In February, Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), introduced an act cracking down on the scams. But so far, there’s been only a patchwork of state regulations governing the usage of BTMs. Some states, like Connecticut, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, require BTM owners to obtain certain licenses. In total, 20 states now either have laws, or have drafted bills, for crypto ATMs, according to the American Association of Retired People, which has been tracking the issue and advocating for reform. Connecticut, which enacted rules after Hogan and his colleagues met with state lawmakers, requires BTM owners to register with the state and provide identifying contact information such as an address and phone number. These licenses can be revoked and suspended by the state and civil penalties can be levied for non-compliance.
However, in Idaho, there are no licensing laws or rules prohibiting the amount of cash one can deposit into a kiosk. Absent guard rails, law enforcement has relied on store clerks to identify and ferret out the crimes.
Some state attorneys general have pursued legal action against manufacturers of Bitcoin ATMs. In February, Iowa attorney general Brenna Bird sued Bitcoin Depot and CoinFlip, accusing the companies of facilitating $20 million worth of scams over a three-year period. The suits alleged that “both Bitcoin Depot and CoinFlip profit directly from Iowa scam victims by imposing excessive, and often hidden, transaction fees,” according to a press release.
In response to a request for comment, a CoinFlip spokesperson said: “CoinFlip takes consumer protection seriously and holds itself to the highest standards of compliance and transparency. CoinFlip has been a registered Money Services Business (MSB) since 2015 and complies with all applicable state and federal regulations.”
Just this week, Washington, D.C., attorney general Brian L. Schwalb filed a similar suit against BTM operator Athena Bitcoin, alleging that 93 percent of transactions on its machines were the product of scams within a five-month period last year. Other class action suits have been filed against Bitcoin Depot this year: One in Indiana accused the company of facilitating cyberscams, while another, in Georgia, alleges negligence on behalf of Bitcoin Depot during a customer data breach.
A Bitcoin Depot spokesperson said: “Protecting customers from scams, especially seniors, remains a top priority, and we share the concern of store clerks and regulators striving to protect them.” The spokesperson also mentioned “multiple safeguards, including ID verification, transaction monitoring, real-time scam warnings, live customer support,” to aid in the event of fraudulent activity.
In its latest annual SEC Filing, however, Bitcoin Depot acknowledged that its safeguards may not be enough to protect consumers. “We have programs designed to vet and monitor these users and the transactions we process for them as part of our risk management efforts, but such programs require continuous improvement and may not be effective in detecting and preventing fraud and illegitimate transactions,” the company said in its 10-K filing. “Our services make us and our users a target for illegal or improper uses, including scams and fraud directed at our users, fraudulent or illegal sales of goods or services, money laundering, and terrorist financing,” the company added.
When money is sent from a Bitcoin ATM like that owned by Bitcoin Depot, it’s difficult to trace where it winds up. Crypto wallets live on the blockchain, identifiable through an alphanumeric address that anonymizes its owner.
When Hardy stopped customers from depositing cash into her store’s BTM, it’s possible she stymied thieves operating on the other side of the globe. Hogan has encountered scam outfits from all over the world, including Ghana, Nigeria, Southeast Asia, and China. “These places don’t have a lot of money, so if this is a method for them to make money, they’re going to do it,” he says. “Once you put money into the machine, you can’t get it back out,” he adds.
Detective Thorne, in Boise, has traced BitCoin Depot deposits from his state back to scammers in Nigeria, he says.
Of the dozens of motorists that enter Hardy’s store each day, she says, it’s rare that anyone ever needs the crypto ATM. Over the past year, Hardy estimates that fewer than two dozen patrons have used the BTM for a legitimate purpose. Everyone else who’s used it has been the victim of a scam, she says. “It’s not super, super popular, that Bitcoin machine.”
Are inspectors missing an easy way to catch HOS cheats and non-compliant ELDs?
Alex Lockie
As ELD service providers cold call trucking companies advertising ways to hide clear hours of service violations, a simple fix to the problem could be hidden in plain sight for roadside inspectors.
That’s according to Jill McBeth of Raven Transportation Safety Consulting, a company that helps motor carriers comply with HOS regs. McBeth has seen firsthand acts of ELD deception and lays the blame on non-compliant ELD service providers.
Drivers know that ELDs connect to the truck’s computer and automatically record events like driving time and stops. Drivers and fleets can edit ELD logs, like when a driver forgets to record lunch or a coffee break as off-duty time, with the driver required to approve any back-office edit, but lately a new type of ELD editing has emerged.
Overdrive reporting revealed that the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, the multinational org charged with coming up with consistent, clear and uniform inspection protocols and the annually updated out-of-service criteria, has seen an uptick in suspiciously perfect ELD logs.
“What inspectors are finding with increased frequency are records of duty status (RODS) that are being completely altered with no indication they were edited at all,” said Jeremy Disbrow, CVSA’s Roadside Inspections Specialist. That’s contrary to what’s required of ELDs — if edits like those mentioned above are being made, the device by regulation is required to preserve those edits, and it’s a best practice for operators to annotate their records to explain edits to avoid roadside hassle.
But according to McBeth, the new type of masked alteration Disbrow noted inspectors are seeing does still leave behind indications of the edits, and if inspectors really cared to find them, they could.
Inspectors typically ask drivers to “send seven days of RODs” — that is, a seven-day logs history, she said. “And they have criteria in the technical standard for ELDs on how the devices must be able to transmit data.”
Overdrive spoke to a former inspector and CDL trainer who said most often these days, drivers transmit the HOS data via a PDF file sent over Bluetooth.
“If the driver doesn’t know how to transmit the data, that’s an OOS violation,” said McBeth. “If the driver says the app doesn’t allow them to transfer the data, the app is not compliant, and the driver is OOS.” But usually, the driver can and does comply, and seven days’ worth of logs is transmitted.
Those PDFs will show any edits made to the log, that the driver or carrier will then have to explain — if drivers are annotating their status changes or edits within the log, the transmitted record itself will help explain it. (For example: I forgot to switch into sleeper berth after parking.)
The new phenomenon of illegally edited ELDs doesn’t show any edits at all, but perfect adherence to the hours of service in the transmitted record.
Yet “every single device, if compliant, is programed to generate a CSV report that is identical” in structure with the same layout and headings as any other compliant device, said McBeth, referring to a “Comma Separated Values” file type that’s commonly used in spreadsheets like those produced in Microsoft Excel.
This sample of a CSV file from a non-compliant ELD shows that some of the driving time has been manually edited. It’s not easy to read, but to the trained eye, these type of edits jump out as needing further investigation, McBeth said.
The spreadsheets are required to conform to the technical standard outlined in the Code of Federal Regulations 395 subpart B section 4.8.2.1, which lays out in detail the columns, headings, and data that needs recording for an ELD to comply with the law.
Digging into the CSV file gets a little technical. McBeth shared with Overdrive sample CSV files from ELDs and pointed to a column that says if driving time was automatically recorded or not.
“You can look at this spreadsheet and in five seconds tell if that device is compliant or not compliant,” she said. Basically, the spreadsheet will show that driving time was manually edited, whereas the technical standard states an “ELD must not allow automatically recorded driving time to be shortened” unless under specific circumstances.
Hope Trans, the fleet behind the tragic Terrell, Texas, crash that killed five in June, had a long history of HOS violations, including stops with drivers that had no ELDs active. How could a company like that pass a DOT audit?
One former Hope Trans driver told local news outlet WFAA that “the company regularly altered shipping records to hide the true number of hours they had been driving.”
How exactly a non-compliant ELD company hides log edits isn’t exactly clear to McBeth, but she strongly suspects that “data manipulation is happening on a provider level. The provider that builds the app and sells it — they’re the ones doing the manipulation.”
Now, according to McBeth, inspectors are seeing suspiciously “perfect” driving logs at inspections.
“I’ve spoken to the other investigators in U.S. and Canada, and the reason [the ELD editing] gets flagged is that it’s way too perfect. There is no driver in the world that drives exactly 10 hours a day.”
This lines up with what Disbrow said previously:
“In many instances, the ELD entries that are shown to inspectors are inaccurate by hundreds or thousands of miles when compared to verified source documents, such as shipping papers, scale receipts, etc. When entire days or multiple days are completely falsified by manipulating the ELD data, inspectors have no way to identify when the driver was actually driving or resting, making it impossible to determine whether they have their required rest or available driving time.”
Of course, roadside inspectors mostly just check that the driver’s ELD shows compliance with the HOS. They do not, typically, check that the ELD complies with the technical standard. But McBeth said that with ELD providers themselves providing on-demand HOS clean up, “roadside inspections are the key” to halting cheats among providers and fleets before the records can be falsified.
Dispatcher Hector Adrien Esquivel Rodriguez recorded a call with a company called Logbook Hub that advertises on Facebook that it can “FIX your logbook” for $30 a week. Rodriguez posted a video to YouTube that featured the company telling him they only need drivers to call or text Logbook Hub, which works with several ELD providers to have driving time added to the books. The Logbook Hub representative described the company editing logs “24/7, no holidays” and manually manipulating driving time and distances.
“If you had a section of the road where you drove 30 miles,” the service can edit the log “squeezing that driving time, we’ll make it for example 55,” the representative said.
This is the kind of log manipulation McBeth said the CSV files will show if inspectors look beyond basic HOS compliance for drivers and into the compliance of the device itself.
While CVSA plans a new OOS violation for this behavior, Overdrive asked if it intended to start checking the CSV files and did not hear back.
FMCSA also did not respond to Overdrive request for comment on the matter in time for publication.
Judge rules on patent infringement complaint between ELD/telematics providers Samsara, Motive
Overdrive Staff
A preliminary ruling has been issued in Samsara’s battle with Motive Technologies over alleged patent infringement.
U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) Judge Doris Johnson Hines determined that Motive does not infringe upon any valid Samsara patent claims, and no Section 337 (claims regarding intellectual property rights) violations were found.
Motive Chief Legal Officer Shu White said Samsara’s claims were an effort to stifle competition and disrupt Motive’s business.
“Knowing they were years behind on the AI front and losing major customers to Motive, Samsara attempted to close the gap by using patent litigation as a marketing tool. But the strategy failed,” Motive Founder and CEO Shoaib Makani wrote in a letter to customers following the ruling. “The Judge’s determination confirms what we have always known — Motive did not copy any of Samsara’s supposed inventions, and Motive’s AI technology is fundamentally better than Samsara’s.”
Samsara filed a lawsuit against Motive in January 2024, asking the court to enter judgment recognizing Motive’s infringement of Samsara’s patents covering several of its solutions in fleet management and driver safety included within Samsara’s telematics, video-based safety and sustainability solutions. The filing also stated that Motive illegally accessed Samsara’s platform and copied Samsara’s marketing materials.
Samsara, in February 2024, followed that lawsuit with this complaint to the ITC, and Motive filed a countersuit against Samsara that same month. Samsara filed another ITC complaint in November 2024, alleging that Motive misappropriated trade secrets and confidential information.
The ITC has not issued its final determination yet, and those other legal proceedings are ongoing.
In a statement to Overdrive sister publication CCJ, Samsara said its litigation was filed “in response to Motive’s multi-year campaign, conducted by Motive’s CEO and senior leaders from Motive’s engineering and product teams, to copy Samsara’s technology. As part of that effort, Motive’s leadership team secretly created fake customer accounts to gain access to Samsara’s systems to study and copy our technology. There are various actions pending against Motive, including claims for unfair competition, trade secret theft, false advertising, breach of contract, and other patent infringement claims.”
Regarding the ITC judge’s preliminary ruling, Samsara said it “does not impact our other ongoing legal actions against Motive, where we will continue to vigorously pursue our claims and ensure that Motive competes fairly and legally. The preliminary ITC ruling remains subject to review by the full Commission, and we are evaluating all options for further review.”
ELD tampering: CVSA drafts new inspections bulletin to combat ‘dangerous trend’
Alex Lockie
ELD tampering has become such a widespread phenomenon that sales agents are cold calling motor carriers offering “ELD editing” and authorities are drafting a new inspections bulletin to combat the “dangerous trend,” according to trucking owner-ops and enforcement communities.
Owner-operator Ilya Denisenko recently got a cold call from a company called AVN Logistics Group. Denisenko said it promised “services such as ELDs, dispatching, oversize permits and e-log editing.”
Contacted by Overdrive about the last of those services, a rep at AVN first said they could add driving time to a driver’s ELD after the driver had run out of hours. Later, however, they insisted the AVN operation was performing strictly legal edits.
Similarly, dispatcher Hector Adrien Esquivel Rodriguez got an unsolicited call from a company called Logbook Hub that advertises on Facebook that it can “FIX your logbook” for $30 a week. Rodriguez posted a video to YouTube that featured him asking this question to the company: “Let’s say I don’t have any more time, I already used my 14 and my 11, and I need to run one more hour. Can you help?”
“Yes, totally,” the voice on the other end of the line responds, saying they have a number drivers can text and a team will edit the logs for them “24/7, no holidays.”
According to Rodriguez, “this company damages the industry, and they are a risk for the people on the road.”
Rodriguez and Denisenko aren’t alone in flagging such out-of-bounds activities. Since the ELD mandate came into play in late 2017, this sort of e-log tampering has grown in prominence so much so that inspectors are contemplating new enforcement mechanisms. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance of law enforcement and industry stakeholders has seen the uptick, and it’s ready to act.
Jeremy Disbrow, CVSA’s Roadside Inspections Specialist, explained what inspectors are seeing now. “Per the ELD technical specifications, driving time that is detected by the ELD cannot be reassigned to a non-driving duty status,” he said. “Additionally, any edits that are made to the record must show they were edited so the edits are identifiable to safety officials. What inspectors are finding with increased frequency are records of duty status (RODS) that are being completely altered with no indication they were edited at all.”
This has created a problem for inspectors, as instead of showing a one-time lapse in HOS records, these new entirely fabricated ELD reports show wildly divergent activity.
“In many instances, the ELD entries that are shown to inspectors are inaccurate by hundreds or thousands of miles when compared to verified source documents, such as shipping papers, scale receipts, etc.,” said Disbrow. “When entire days or multiple days are completely falsified by manipulating the ELD data, inspectors have no way to identify when the driver was actually driving or resting, making it impossible to determine whether they have their required rest or available driving time.”
As Disbrow noted, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s ELD mandate device specifications in 2017 required that log records can’t be edited without evidence of such editing being left behind in a driver’s record in the device. Yet FMCSA doesn’t actually test the code and hardware for each individual ELD in its device registry, all of which initially self-certified that they follow the rules.
Today, there are more than 1,000 ELD models on FMCSA’s device registry.
The kinds of tampering described above have become become something of an open secret, according to watchers. Disbrow said when inspectors interview drivers about ELD tampering, some common themes emerge. Here’s how he described a typical scenario:
“The motor carrier tells the driver to contact them when they run out of available time to drive,” he said. The motor carrier then “contacts a third party who is able to quickly alter the records to eliminate any violations.” The scenario lines up with what the Logbook Hub rep told Rodriguez.
In some ways, this kind of thing isn’t exactly new. ELD cheating has been around as long as ELDs themselves. Paper logs, too, have long injected a kind of “honor system” into HOS regulations. But this new brand of tampering isn’t any kind of honor system, nor is it like ghost logs, where one driver has two ELDs, one under a fake name to look like a co-driver.
Today’s problem looks to have hit industrial scale, aided and abetted by businesses purpose-built to help motor carriers evade HOS regulations.
“This type of tampering cannot happen unintentionally. It is not a simple error in a record of duty because a driver accidentally made a mistake,” said Disbrow. “This type of tampering is conducted, often by third parties outside of the U.S., on devices that do not meet the technical specifications in the federal regulations.”
These third parties are “completely fabricating the record to show a compliant ELD file without any violations, and in many cases, even falsify electronic supporting documents to match the ELD file,” which gives inspectors real trouble, he said. As of about a year ago, he added, there had been some “isolated reports of inspectors encountering this type of tampering,” yet over the past year, “as inspectors have learned of these techniques, there have been many more instances uncovered across the country.”
CVSA has been passing that information around among inspectors, industry and FMCSA “to help minimize the impact of this dangerous trend,” he said. CVSA’s Driver-Traffic Enforcement Committee “took two important steps to help curtail fatigued driving as a result of ELD tampering.” The first step is the new inspection bulletin “that explains the difference between a typical false entry in a record of duty status, such as a driver claiming off-duty time while fueling their vehicle, and an ELD file that has been manipulated.”
The second was a CVSA committee vote “to add a section to the North American Out of Service Criteria (OOSC) for ELD tampering,” Disbrow added. Currently OOS language for false entries “requires an inspector to prove that the driver would have exceeded the 11, 14, 60 or 70-hour rules at the time of the inspection if the record was not falsified.”
That language “will not change,” but with the dawn of a new era of ELD tampering, “entire days are often manipulated making it impossible for inspectors to determine when actual driving or rest periods occurred,” as noted above. In those instances, “the committee suggested to add an OOS violation to the OOSC which would automatically place the driver OOS until they obtain the required rest.”
The change in the OOSC won’t come quickly, however. CVSA membership will have a final vote on the topic near the end of the year, and the OOSC is annually updated in April. This year, CVSA made the emergency move to add English language proficiency back to the OOSC by June 25, but Disbrow didn’t mention any such effort on the ELD-tampering front. “If it is added to the OOSC, the bulletin,” as is usual, “will be released prior to April 1, 2026, to prepare enforcement and industry for the change,” said Disbrow.
Disbrow acknowledged that some among Overdrive‘s readers “will be concerned about a new OOS condition being added,” but clarified that “this type of tampering will not be a problem for any carriers that are trying to be compliant. This type of tampering is completely intentional and often requires the carrier to pay a third party to ‘scrub’ their logs of any violations.”
FMCSA didn’t respond to questions about what the agency might be doing in response to CVSA’s alerting them to the new trend in ELD tampering, yet FMCSA does semi-regularly remove ELDs from the approved-devices registry. Disbrow said CVSA was “working closely with law enforcement to uncover these tactics and sharing information with FMCSA.”
Disbrow also mentioned something of a “revolving door” problem with the bad actors on ELD registry. “FMCSA maintains the list of approved ELDs that have self-certified,” he said, yet as FMCSA becomes “aware of non-compliant devices, they conduct investigations and revoke these non-compliant devices when appropriate. Unfortunately, some of these companies start over under a new name and the process repeats itself.”
It remains unclear if FMCSA has acted on CVSA-shared information on the tampering issue.
Disbrow concluded with a focus on on bedrock safety outcomes, emphasizing that this type of tampering could open carriers and drivers up to major criminal and civil liabilities, particularly in the event a crash.
“While it may be tempting to tamper with an ELD to gain some extra driving time, the violations that may follow are frankly the least of anyone’s concerns,” he said. “The larger issue is the criminal and civil liability that will follow in the event of a collision, not to mention the potential injuries or loss of life from the collision. This trend is nothing short of fraud and false information, and the liability to the motor carrier or driver during a lawsuit or criminal trial is a far bigger concern.”
