Crash Spurs Investigation of Tactics Designed to Circumvent HOS Rules
Eric Miller
Faced with evolving tactics to bypass hours-of-service rules, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is taking steps to combat electronic logging device fraud. The agency is launching a multipronged approach to address what it describes as a “moving target.”
In particular, the agency cited National Transportation Safety Board concerns with so-called ghost drivers as well as drivers utilizing multiple ELD accounts, and it is exploring various technological requirements to target those specific issues. It also is monitoring ELD performance data, training enforcement personnel to identify and act against fraud, removing noncompliant ELD providers from the market, and updating its ELD rules.
“FMCSA is committed to staying diligent with its fraud prevention efforts,” an agency spokeswoman said in a statement. “FMCSA continues to explore other methods to decrease ELD fraud in both the short and long term.”
A fatal December 2022 crash in Virginia put a spotlight on ELD fraud after a tractor-trailer driver for Illinois-based Triton Logistics was able to — with apparent participation from the carrier — falsify his ELD records to extend his driving time beyond the 11-hour regulatory maximum limit. The truck he was driving during early morning hours along Interstate 64 near Williamsburg, Va., came upon and crashed into a party bus after he failed to take evasive action or brake in time, according to the NTSB investigation. NTSB cited fatigue as a factor in the crash.
“We found that the truck driver’s lack of response to the slow-moving vehicle in his travel lane was due to fatigue from excess driving time and lack of sleep opportunity,” said the NTSB report, recently made public. “The truck’s motor carrier, Triton Logistics, created fictitious driver accounts for some of its vehicles’ electronic logging device systems that enabled drivers to operate beyond federal regulations, creating an opportunity for fatigued driving.”
Three occupants in the party bus died, nine sustained serious injuries, and 11 sustained minor injuries. The truck driver also was seriously injured.
Triton did not return a message left by Transport Topics seeking comment. However, NTSB said the company’s CEO denied knowledge of the fictitious logins and said it conducted internal checks to determine how the incident happened.
The driver detailed the scheme for NTSB investigators. He said whenever he reached his 11-hour limit, he could call the carrier’s HOS department — based in Lithuania — and add the name of a fictitious or former co-driver to the ELD, opening up another 11-hour driving window. If asked by a roadside inspector about the double login, the driver would tell the inspector that he dropped off his co-driver at a truck stop for a family emergency. The driver noted that other drivers used the login scheme to extend time behind the wheel.
After the 2022 crash, FMCSA conducted an on-site review of Triton and issued violations related to drivers making false reports regarding duty status as well as requiring or permitting drivers to extend driving time beyond 11 hours. After the review, FMCSA assigned Triton a conditional safety rating.
With an eye toward remedial action, NTSB concluded that a data-entry tracking history in ELD software could increase accountability and transparency and also deter motor carrier personnel from making false entries aimed at circumventing HOS regulations. Investigators recommended that FMCSA revise its requirements to require ELD providers to create an audit log that includes the date, driver login time and identity of who logged them in, driver’s license numbers, the names of anyone who edits a log, and any changes to active driver lists. NTSB also recommended that the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance inform its members about the scheme and circumstances surrounding the Williamsburg crash.
Senior NTSB investigator Shawn Currie told Transport Topics if the driver’s name was John, he’d be logged in as Frank and then operate with a new 11-hour HOS time limit. “The hours of service, whether you agree with them or not, are there to prevent drivers from driving in excess of the rules, and to ensure they have the appropriate time off,” Currie said. He noted that the circumstance of the Williamsburg case could result in FMCSA fines and possibly criminal penalties if the state elected to bring charges.
Jeremy Disbrow, a Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance roadside inspection specialist, said inspectors encounter false ELD log entries “all day, every day. Of course, many of the false entries can’t be proven, or they go unnoticed.”
He said the issue is known to CVSA inspectors. “We just discussed all this in a conference after the NTSB report came out,” Disbrow said. “It was pretty clear from the inspectors around the country that this isn’t an isolated incident by any means. The average inspector is seeing this every shift, at least once or twice. There’s a number of ways that they’re falsifying [logs].”
This can include simply using tools available on some devices, he said.
“Drivers can make edits,” Disbrow noted. “If a driver makes an edit on the device himself, it will show up as an edit, and a suspicious inspector can see that. But if a carrier in their back office makes the edit, there are instances where it’s been done but doesn’t show up as an edit.”
Disbrow noted it’s risky to publicly discuss the varying methods. “It’s hard to talk about it because I don’t want to give people ideas,” he said. “I don’t want the industry to say, ‘Hey we can try that.’ As the years are going by, people are finding new workarounds. It’s a cat and mouse game.”
He added, “The hours-of-service rules are there to protect everybody. Thwarting them and running an extra five, six, seven hours without adequate rest is absolutely a recipe for fatigue.”
NTSB report finds fake driver logs contributed to Triton Logistics crash that killed 3
John Gallagher
WASHNGTON — Safety investigators have warned the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to tighten electronic logging device (ELD) requirements to prevent trucking companies and their drivers from creating fake driver hours-of-service (HOS) logs.
The recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board was included in a crash report issued on Wednesday concluding that truck driver fatigue, due to excessive driving time and limited opportunity to sleep, was the probable cause of a December 2022 crash on I-64 in Virginia in which the truck driver rammed the back of medium-size bus, killing three people.
“Contributing to the truck driver’s fatigue was the motor carrier, Triton Logistics Incorporated, which created fictitious driver accounts in the electronic logging device system and enabled drivers to operate their vehicles for hours in excess of federal regulations,” the NTSB stated.
Over the course of the 20-month investigation, the NTSB found that management of the Romeoville, Illinois-based trucking company would instruct drivers to manipulate ELD driver logs when they exceeded their federal drive-time limits.
“Specifically, the drivers would call in to the carrier’s HOS department by cell phone and the carrier would log them into the alternate driver account, which allowed them to continue driving under a false account and circumvent the HOS regulations,” the NTSB report stated.
Daniel Cramer, 61, the driver of the truck involved in the crash, described to investigators the existence of a data center in Lithuania “that Triton used to manage — and when needed, manipulate — drivers’ electronic logs to make it look like they had more time for rest than they really did,” according to WAVY.com reporting in March.
In the days leading up to the crash, Cramer had exceeded FMCSA’s 14-hour driving window four times and the 11-hour driving limit three times. He had also exceeded the 70-hour rule by more than 4 hours in a period of 7 consecutive days.
“Also, because drivers were paid by the mile, they were financially incentivized to exceed their HOS limits because it allowed them to drive farther and earn more money,” NTSB stated.
The agency noted that Triton’s chief executive officer and the HOS manager denied knowing about fictitious logins. The company did not respond to phone calls by FreightWaves seeking comment on the report’s findings.
After an on-site focused review conducted of Triton after the crash, FMCSA found violations that included making, or permitting a driver to make, a false report regarding their duty status and allowing a driver to exceed HOS limits.
FMCSA fined Triton $36,170 for those violations along with failure to conduct post-crash alcohol testing. It also assigned Triton a “conditional” safety rating, which means a carrier does not have adequate safety management controls in place to ensure compliance with the safety fitness standards.
As a result of the investigation, NTSB recommended that FMCSA revise ELD requirements to require that ELD providers create an audit log that includes:
- Date.
- Driver login time and who logged them in.
- Names of anyone who edited the log.
- Driver’s license numbers.
- Active driver list changes.
Other recommendations include:
- The Commonwealth of Virginia should offer management safety guidance to new intrastate motor carrier licensees covering license class, drug and alcohol testing, fatigue management, vehicle maintenance, and safe commercial vehicle operation.
- Triton Logistics should implement a process to regularly verify the accuracy of drivers’ records of duty, implement a strong fatigue management program, and use onboard inward- and forward-facing video event recording to improve driver training.
- Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance should use this crash to educate members on the importance of safeguarding the ELD system to prevent falsification of information.
NTSB also reiterated two previous recommendations:
- National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should complete the development of performance standards to assess forward collision avoidance systems in commercial vehicles. NHTSA should also require that all trucks over 10,000 pounds be equipped with onboard video recorders that record event data.
- FMCSA should provide guidance to motor carriers on the use of onboard video recordings to ensure driver compliance with regulations and safe operations.
(This false log method does not require spoofing or jamming. Just adding the ghost driver and lying to the MCSAP inspector.)
Stephen G. Lowry
An electronic logging device, or ELD, is installed in a commercial truck to record how long a driver has been on the road. Not every truck has them – any truck manufactured before 2000 won’t have the system in place; neither will certain types of vehicles or short-haul trucks – but most commercial vehicles used for long-haul trucking have these devices.
ELDs are supposed to ensure that commercial drivers (and the companies which employ them) follow the federally-mandated Hours of Service (HOS) rules. HOS rules “refers to the maximum amount of time drivers are permitted to be on duty including driving time, and specifies number and length of rest periods, to help ensure that drivers stay awake and alert.” These rules were implemented for safety reasons: fatigued truck drivers are dangerous drivers, and companies can and do often push their drivers to the brink when it comes to delivering goods.
This is why a recent investigation by Freightwaves, a price reporting agency that deals exclusively with the global freight market, is so disturbing. Per their findings, “industry insiders are accusing some ELD vendors of exploiting flaws in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s technical specifications to let trucking companies and their drivers add ‘ghost co-drivers’ to skirt hours-of-service rules.”
What’s a ghost account/driver?
A ghost account is a “dummy” account created within a truck’s system that allows a company to “prevent unassigned driving time from building up in the system.” For example, say a company wants to run a road test for a new driver. The “ghost driver” would be logged into the system so that the ELD wouldn’t record the new driver’s road test as actual logged miles. There are perfectly legal reasons to use a ghost account – but avoiding HOS violations isn’t one of them.
How some ELD vendors are using their software to add more driver time
What ELD Rider is doing, according to Freightwaves, is creating fake drivers as a way to get around the HOS rules. A trucker told Freightwaves the following story (with corroborating video) about his experience with the ELD vendor:
Recently, a driver using ELD Rider software recorded a ghost co-driver being added to his device within 15-20 minutes after the driver contacted the company to request more hours….
At the time the U.S. driver contacted the ELD Rider representative in Serbia, the driver, who didn’t want to be named for fear of retaliation, had no drive time left on his clock and only 12 hours remaining on his 70-hour cycle before he was required by FMCSA to take a 34-hour reset.
He later received a call from ELD Rider confirming that the representative had edited the log to add a co-driver, often referred to as a ghost driver. The video then pans to the driver logging back into his device, showing that he now had almost 10 hours of drive time left in his day and around 68 hours remaining on his cycle before he must take 34 consecutive hours off duty before driving again.
This behavior, Freightwaves reports, has been going on since 2019.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is conducting an investigation, but it is likely to take a long time; ELD Rider is owned by LionEight LLC, which was once owned and operated by LionEight TMS LLC, but has been since sold off to Darex Solutions. In short, determining ownership and liability may be complicated, and the FMCSA has only just begun to ramp up its enforcement efforts against companies which skirt their regulations.
Truckers Report
Mainly Chicagoland does this, so what they do is they buy an ELD service platform from overseas although the ELD platform believes they are in America because they furnish a credible USDOT/MC, vehicle count, and fake business fronts.
So even though they’re dispatching from overseas & not American-based whatsoever, the scammers use Google voice numbers, fake websites & fronts to create false imitations to the ELD platforms. Then they’ll imitate the ELD customer service line of the actual ELD platform to the drivers and then the carriers scam their own drivers, brokers, and shippers/receivers with weekly production.
The drivers don’t actually team drive it’s fake in reality but on paperwork, the scammer carriers reverse engineer the way elogs works, there’s not ever really two drivers for the one shipment it’s really only one driver. Brokers have no idea they just let a team load ship by a solo driver working under a foreign scam carriers Pretending to be an American carrier company.
It’s really all the ELD platforms fault because there’s No verification system for the driver HOS protection at length, ELD platforms haven’t designed a way to prevent the scamming from Russia, India, or other countries scamming all over America…. and then what the scammer carriers do as well…is after even the Driver no longer works there for the scam carrier, the scam carrier still use the CDL driver’s license without the driver’s knowledge even though he/she is long gone month and months later. The scam carrier takes the drivers CDL Credentials amongst the other drivers doing fake team driving and without permission of the CDL driver uses the driver’s license.. The scam carriers do this to falsify record government filings to drive up vehicle mileage fraud, tax evasion, falsify production, and so so forth.
So basically say CDL drivers at home out of work for months but they are actually working at companies all throughout the states where their license is being utilized but they’re actually never there because they don’t actually have a job… but the scammer carriers from overseas with the false fake American fronts are illegally using the drivers CDL license while the real driver is actually out of work at home wondering hmm where should I work next.
Crash Spurs Investigation of Tactics Designed to Circumvent HOS Rules
Eric Miller
Faced with evolving tactics to bypass hours-of-service rules, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is taking steps to combat electronic logging device fraud. The agency is launching a multipronged approach to address what it describes as a “moving target.”
In particular, the agency cited National Transportation Safety Board concerns with so-called ghost drivers as well as drivers utilizing multiple ELD accounts, and it is exploring various technological requirements to target those specific issues. It also is monitoring ELD performance data, training enforcement personnel to identify and act against fraud, removing noncompliant ELD providers from the market, and updating its ELD rules.
“FMCSA is committed to staying diligent with its fraud prevention efforts,” an agency spokeswoman said in a statement. “FMCSA continues to explore other methods to decrease ELD fraud in both the short and long term.”
A fatal December 2022 crash in Virginia put a spotlight on ELD fraud after a tractor-trailer driver for Illinois-based Triton Logistics was able to — with apparent participation from the carrier — falsify his ELD records to extend his driving time beyond the 11-hour regulatory maximum limit. The truck he was driving during early morning hours along Interstate 64 near Williamsburg, Va., came upon and crashed into a party bus after he failed to take evasive action or brake in time, according to the NTSB investigation. NTSB cited fatigue as a factor in the crash.
“We found that the truck driver’s lack of response to the slow-moving vehicle in his travel lane was due to fatigue from excess driving time and lack of sleep opportunity,” said the NTSB report, recently made public. “The truck’s motor carrier, Triton Logistics, created fictitious driver accounts for some of its vehicles’ electronic logging device systems that enabled drivers to operate beyond federal regulations, creating an opportunity for fatigued driving.”
Three occupants in the party bus died, nine sustained serious injuries, and 11 sustained minor injuries. The truck driver also was seriously injured.
Triton did not return a message left by Transport Topics seeking comment. However, NTSB said the company’s CEO denied knowledge of the fictitious logins and said it conducted internal checks to determine how the incident happened.
The driver detailed the scheme for NTSB investigators. He said whenever he reached his 11-hour limit, he could call the carrier’s HOS department — based in Lithuania — and add the name of a fictitious or former co-driver to the ELD, opening up another 11-hour driving window. If asked by a roadside inspector about the double login, the driver would tell the inspector that he dropped off his co-driver at a truck stop for a family emergency. The driver noted that other drivers used the login scheme to extend time behind the wheel.
After the 2022 crash, FMCSA conducted an on-site review of Triton and issued violations related to drivers making false reports regarding duty status as well as requiring or permitting drivers to extend driving time beyond 11 hours. After the review, FMCSA assigned Triton a conditional safety rating.
With an eye toward remedial action, NTSB concluded that a data-entry tracking history in ELD software could increase accountability and transparency, and also deter motor carrier personnel from making false entries aimed at circumventing HOS regulations. Investigators recommended that FMCSA revise its requirements to require ELD providers to create an audit log that includes the date, driver login time and identity of who logged them in, driver’s license numbers, the names of anyone who edits a log, and any changes to active driver lists. NTSB also recommended that the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance inform its members about the scheme and circumstances surrounding the Williamsburg crash.
Senior NTSB investigator Shawn Currie told Transport Topics if the driver’s name was John, he’d be logged in as Frank and then operate with a new 11-hour HOS time limit. “The hours of service, whether you agree with them or not, are there to prevent drivers from driving in excess of the rules, and to ensure they have the appropriate time off,” Currie said. He noted that the circumstance of the Williamsburg case could result in FMCSA fines and possibly criminal penalties if the state elected to bring charges.
Jeremy Disbrow, a Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance roadside inspection specialist, said inspectors encounter false ELD log entries “all day, every day. Of course, many of the false entries can’t be proven, or they go unnoticed.”
He said the issue is known to CVSA inspectors. “We just discussed all this in a conference after the NTSB report came out,” Disbrow said. “It was pretty clear from the inspectors around the country that this isn’t an isolated incident by any means. The average inspector is seeing this every shift, at least once or twice. There’s a number of ways that they’re falsifying [logs].”
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This can include simply using tools available on some devices, he said.
“Drivers can make edits,” Disbrow noted. “If a driver makes an edit on the device himself, it will show up as an edit, and a suspicious inspector can see that. But if a carrier in their back office makes the edit, there are instances where it’s been done but doesn’t show up as an edit.”
Disbrow noted it’s risky to publicly discuss the varying methods. “It’s hard to talk about it because I don’t want to give people ideas,” he said. “I don’t want the industry to say, ‘Hey we can try that.’ As the years are going by, people are finding new workarounds. It’s a cat and mouse game.”
He added, “The hours-of-service rules are there to protect everybody. Thwarting them and running an extra five, six, seven hours without adequate rest is absolutely a recipe for fatigue.”
