Law enforcement, regulators and policymakers are cracking down on ELD manipulation and noncompliant devices
Fraudsters are constantly using newer technology to develop methods of evading regulations. (Krista Bussey/Transport Topics)
“Ghost driver” schemes can obscure a driver’s actual time behind the wheel and circumvent HOS limits. (Krista Bussey/Transport Topics)
Mindy Long
Federally mandated electronic logging devices have made driver hours-of-service violations harder to hide than they were during the days of paper logbooks, but bad actors have devised increasingly sophisticated methods to cheat.
Some noncompliant motor carriers have been skirting safety regulations by working with dubious technology vendors to illegally falsify driver records.
In response, federal regulators, law enforcement and elected officials are taking action to clamp down on ELD manipulation.
“The frequency and technical sophistication involved with the tampering has changed significantly,” said Jeremy Disbrow, roadside inspection specialist for the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance.
Some schemes involve fictitious driver accounts, sometimes described as “ghost drivers,” created by third-party dispatchers or rogue ELD providers to obscure the driver’s actual time behind the wheel and circumvent HOS limits.
“The problem has become significantly worse as some ELD vendors have advertised that they will manipulate a driver’s records for a monthly service fee,” Disbrow said.
When stopped, a driver can send a text message and, within minutes, the time and location information is changed, making a trip appear compliant.
“Inspectors have seen this work in real time when the data changes while the inspector is actually looking at the device,” Disbrow said.
Industry reporting has shown that some foreign ELD providers are selling devices in the U.S. “with the express aim of helping falsify driver logs, including during roadside inspections, so drivers can stay on the road past the point of safe operation,” said Eric Danko, head of global public policy and government affairs for technology supplier Samsara.
While there have always been drivers and fleets that work around the edges of the HOS rules, this form of ELD manipulation goes further.
“This is an entirely different scenario,” said Kevin Grove, director of safety and technology policy for American Trucking Associations. “This is whole-cloth fabrication of the logs.”
Simpler tactics for manipulating driver records remain as well.
“We regularly see misuse of personal conveyance and yard-move statuses, edits that convert on-duty time to off-duty time, and unassigned-driving events that are never properly attributed to a driver,” said Josh Lovan, an industry business adviser with J.J. Keller & Associates.
A driver could also have multiple driver IDs on the same hardware or more than one ELD application operating on the same device.
“Back in the day, the way to cheat the system was to carry two logbooks,” said Joe Ohr, chief operations and technical officer for the National Motor Freight Traffic Association. “The digital way to do that is to have two logins.”
Tougher enforcement
Most motor carriers comply with the regulations, but ELD falsification remains a significant issue that can be hard to quantify.
“We know some scope from enforcement and what they’ve found at roadside … but their inspection process doesn’t touch every truck every day,” ATA’s Grove said.
False records-of-duty status were the second-most cited driver violation in 2025, with more than 58,000 instances recorded, said Jason Hartwig, associate director of product management at J.J. Keller.
CVSA placed heightened emphasis on ELD tampering, falsification and manipulation during its annual International Roadcheck enforcement blitz in May.
The organization also has expanded training on ELD tampering and strengthened enforcement. Since April, a manipulated logbook violation carries a 10-hour out-of-service penalty.
Those changes have given inspectors more leverage, said Capt. Anthony Gerard with the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
“Our out-of-service rate for drivers having manipulated or tampered logbooks have gone up significantly,” he added.
With ELD tampering harder to detect, inspectors have turned to other sources to verify driver hours, including fuel and meal receipts, bills of lading, toll records and GPS data, but even those can be manipulated.
“We have seen numerous AI-generated shipping papers, registrations, insurance and all sorts of documents that are fake,” Gerard said.
Increasingly, inspectors are utilizing license plate readers to compare a truck’s location with its electronic logs, he said.
Inspectors also are getting better at interviewing drivers about their trips, Gerard added. “They will lock [drivers] down to a story up front, and it eliminates their excuses later on.”
More scrutiny on ELD vendors
In the decade since the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration began phasing in its ELD rule in 2016, technology vendors have been registering their devices with FMCSA through a self-certification process with limited oversight.
For the past couple years, though, FMCSA has placed more scrutiny on questionable ELD vendors and has been steadily purging its registry of devices that fail to meet minimum requirements.
As of early August, the agency had delisted 95 devices since January 2025.
“FMCSA is committed to ensuring that electronic logging devices meet the highest standards for accuracy, reliability and compliance,” FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs said in an Aug. 6 statement. “When devices fail to satisfy the agency’s requirements, we will take appropriate action to protect the integrity of hours-of-service records and support our mission of improving safety on our nation’s roadways.”
FMCSA has also “closed the doors” temporarily on new ELD vendors while it reviews registered devices and determines how to safely allow new devices, ATA’s Grove explained.
NMFTA’s Ohr said the issue is complicated by the prevalence of white-label ELDs. While white labeling isn’t evidence of fraud or noncompliance, it means multiple products can share the same underlying software, cloud infrastructure and administrative tools while being marketed under different names.
NMFTA has reviewed about 75% of ELDs on the federal registry and found that roughly 70% of those were white labeled.
The association grouped providers into “families,” and Ohr said some families have more than 100 entries. “You revoke one, but what about the other 50 in the family?”
Ohr has also seen registry entries with incomplete or questionable company information, including addresses that point to empty lots or brokerages rather than ELD developers.
These types of findings have reinforced calls for more independent review of devices.
ATA’s board voted unanimously in October 2025 to support third-party certification and formed a working group of fleets, ELD providers and other stakeholders to create certification recommendations for FMCSA. It plans to share them during ATA’s 2026 Management Conference & Exhibition in October.
Canada has taken a different approach to device certification. While its ELD mandate largely mirrored the U.S. technical standard, it requires independent third-party certification of the devices.
Melanie Simard, vice president of safety, compliance and technical support for Isaac Instruments and a member of ATA’s working group, said Canada has about 100 certified ELDs, compared with more than 900 devices on FMCSA’s U.S. list.
Ensuring compliance
Compliant ELD providers have safeguards built into their technology to prevent tampering.
Simard said automatically recorded driving time cannot be modified within reputable systems.
“If it was recorded by the ELD, the wheels were spinning and the truck was driving — we can’t change that,” she explained. “No one at Isaac is allowed to go into a logbook and modify it.”
Authorized carrier personnel can, however, make edits to correctly assign that driving time when appropriate. Drivers can easily forget to change duty status or log out, for example.
Simard said those types of corrections are part of normal fleet operations and permitted by the regulations.
Danko said any edit in Samsara’s system creates a new, versioned record rather than overwriting the original, and every event carries a record of who made it and why. A motor carrier administrator can propose certain changes, but the driver must accept or reject them.
Even with those protections in place, compliance takes effort, fleet operators said.
“First and foremost, we use an FMSCA-compliant ELD. We keep the ELD software and firmware current,” said Deen Albert, vice president of operations at Grand Island Express, a refrigerated carrier based in Grand Island, Neb. “We restrict administrative access to authorized personnel only.”
Truckload carrier Boyle Transportation validates drivers’ log hours on a daily, weekly and quarterly basis.
“ELD compliance isn’t something we simply assume because we have an electronic system in the truck,” said Michael Lasko, assistant general manager and vice president at Boyle Transportation. “Technology is an important compliance tool, but it still requires active human oversight.”
Boyle conducts comprehensive audits of its HOS records to detect potential violations or anomalies.
“We also review unassigned drive time daily to verify that our professional drivers are actively logged into the ELD for every mile they are behind the wheel,” Lasko said.
Lori Johnson, a senior consultant with Fleetworthy, said carriers should review unassigned driving reports, edit histories and supporting documents.
Accountability can’t stop with the driver, she said. “It’s accountability to the dispatcher, the supervisor, the manager, all the way up.”
How cheaters prosper
Bad actors within the trucking industry have a strong incentive to circumvent HOS rules. Carriers that illegally create more driving time can move more freight with the same truck and driver, increasing utilization.
“The more miles you run, the more your cost comes down,” said Zach Meiborg, CEO at Meiborg Cos., a truckload carrier and logistics provider based in Rockford, Ill.
Meiborg said his company has lost freight to competitors that cheat on HOS, enabling them to offer lower per-mile rates that compliant carriers can’t match.
“We lost a lot of business to brokers and had shippers flat out tell us, ‘Why would we pay you $2.50 when I can get it for $1.70?’” he said. “There’s an adverse incentive to do the right thing.”
The consequences go far beyond freight transactions.
Albert of Grand Island Express said unsafe practices and fatigue-related crashes contribute to higher insurance costs and greater liability across the industry.
“Drivers who are pushed past legal hours may become fatigued, increasing the risk of crashes and injuries,” he said.
CVSA’s Disbrow said some drivers have told inspectors that carriers pressured them to participate in tampering. Newer drivers can be particularly vulnerable if they enter the industry through carriers that normalize fraudulent practices.
ELD legislation
Congress is also considering ways to reduce the risk of ELD manipulation.
The GHOSTRUCK Act, introduced in the House by Reps. Greg Steube of Florida and Dave Taylor of Ohio, would require ELD edits made by a carrier, dispatcher or other authorized agent to originate from someone physically located in North America.
J.J. Keller’s Hartwig called it “a meaningful, targeted safeguard” against offshore dispatchers. However, many in the industry said it only addresses one form of manipulation and could be hard to enforce.
ATA supports the bill. Ultimately, Grove said the goal is to create more “touchpoints” where fraudulent activity can be detected among ELD providers, fleets, drivers, FMCSA and enforcement and to shorten the window in which a bad device or falsified record can exist without being discovered.
“I think we just need to agree on a path forward and get moving on it,” he said.
