FMCSA finalizes 12 deregulatory changes

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has finalized a broad array of deregulatory changes affecting vehicle standards, inspection requirements, emergency equipment, licensing rules, and more.

Published February 19, 2026, the rule changes have limited impact but they represent the FMCSA’s first salvo at providing regulatory relief under the Trump administration. More rule changes are expected in the near future.

REAL-ID, Mail-Order CDLs, and America’s CDL Free-for-All

You can buy a Mexican commercial license online for $200. Six states will convert it to an American CDL without verifying your legal presence. And the federal audit just started.

Rob Carpenter

Somewhere between a Philadelphia apartment and a flea market in South Texas, between a wire transfer to a Mexican fixer and a California DMV counter that doesn’t blink at a birth certificate listing “No Name Given,” the American commercial driver’s license system broke. Not bent. Not stressed. Broke.

It is so broken that a 2025 federal audit found that one in four non-domiciled CDLs issued by California were improper. It broke so badly that Oklahoma state troopers pulled over commercial vehicles driven by individuals whose official government-issued CDLs listed their first name as “No Name Given.” It broke so completely that for $2,500 wired to the right contact in Mexico, a Honduran national who has never sat behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer can receive a digital Licencia Federal de Conductor, a Mexican federal commercial driver’s license, in his email inbox, printed against a backdrop of his garage door, and use it to drive 80,000 pounds of freight on American highways.

This is not a single problem. It is a constellation of failures, federal, state, and international, that have converged into what U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called “an imminent hazard on America’s roadways” and “a direct threat to the safety of every family on the road.” At least five fatal crashes in the first eight months of 2025 involved non-domiciled CDL holders. In one, a driver attempted an illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike in St. Lucie County, killing three Americans. In another, a March crash in Austin involving 17 vehicles killed five people, including two children.

The crashes are the symptom. The disease is a licensing infrastructure so fragmented, so riddled with loopholes and willful state-level negligence, that it has effectively created multiple open doors for unvetted, unqualified, and in many cases undocumented individuals to obtain credentials to operate the deadliest vehicles on American roads. Those doors have names: AB 60, Driver’s Licenses for All, non-domiciled CDLs, reciprocal license recognition, and the newest and perhaps most brazen of them all, the Mexican mail-order CDL.

The $2,500 CDL You Never Have to Earn

The story of the mail-order Mexican CDL begins, ironically, with a modernization effort. In April 2021, Mexico’s Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes began issuing digital versions of the Licencia Federal de Conductor, or LFC. The move was intended to reduce fraud by replacing hard-copy licenses that had long been counterfeited using materials sourced from China, from the same manufacturer, with licenses bearing the same holograms used by the Mexican government. U.S. Customs had been seizing counterfeit materials from cargo ships for years, but had never connected the dots to the downstream implications for American highway safety.

The digital transition didn’t kill the fraud. It supercharged it.

According to Maj. Omar Villarreal of the Texas Highway Patrol’s Commercial Vehicle Enforcement division, the scheme works like this: An aspiring driver, often not a Mexican national but a citizen of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia, or Venezuela, hears through informal networks that a Mexican CDL is available for purchase. The buyer emails a photograph of themselves, provides basic biographical information, and wires between $2,000 and $5,000, depending on the state where the transaction is facilitated. What arrives is a digital LFC that, when queried through Mexico’s SCT verification portal, may appear legitimate or redirect to a fraudulent clone website that mimics the official system.

Texas enforcement officers began catching these fakes because of the photos. Where legitimate LFC photos would be taken in a Mexican government facility, the digital frauds showed drivers standing in front of garage doors, against residential backdrops, and against living room walls. The backgrounds told the story the documents were designed to hide: these licenses were never issued in Mexico. Many of the holders had never been to Mexico.

“We started noticing in the Austin area an uptick of commercial vehicles engaged in construction,” Villarreal told FreightWaves. That uptick soon gave way to massive encampments forming outside Texas cities, with 80 to 100 commercial vehicles at a time, housing operators working in short-haul construction and aggregate hauling. “We started seeing this crop up all over the major metropolitan areas of Texas.”

When officers interviewed the drivers, many disclosed they were Central American nationals who had acquired their Mexican LFCs without ever setting foot in a testing facility. The digital transition had opened the door to corruption within the Mexican government, which allegedly began selling LFCs to third-party vendors, who then resold them internationally. The result is a fully operational, transnational commercial licensing fraud operation, one that the Biden-era FMCSA and CVSA showed little appetite to address when Texas first raised the alarm.

Cabotage, the Border Zone, and the Legal Fiction

Under NAFTA and now under the USMCA, the United States, Mexico, and Canada agreed to recognize each other’s commercial driver’s licenses for international commerce. A Mexican driver holding a valid LFC can legally deliver international cargo into the United States, but only within designated commercial zones along the southern border or under limited long-haul authority granted to a small number of Mexican carriers following a 2011-2015 congressional pilot program.

The critical restriction is cabotage. Under 49 CFR § 365.501(b) and 19 CFR § 123.14(c), a Mexico-domiciled carrier may not provide point-to-point transportation within the United States for goods other than international cargo. Period. When a Mexican carrier delivers a load into the U.S., it must either find a return load to Mexico or deadhead home. It cannot haul freight from Dallas to Houston. It cannot pick up domestic loads. The regulation exists to protect American trucking jobs and ensure domestic freight moves on domestic credentials.

In theory.

In practice, as the Trucking and Enforcement Action Coalition noted in its 2025 recommendations, “there is nothing to stop drivers authorized for border-zone-only hauling from operating beyond the zone without proper authorization or language proficiency verification.” State law enforcement cannot enforce federal cabotage rules. FMCSA has statutory authority to levy $10,000 civil fines for cabotage violations, but has a longstanding pattern of failing to follow through. The result is a system where the rules exist on paper and evaporate on the highway.

And here is where the mail-order Mexican CDL becomes more than a fraud problem. Under reciprocal recognition, a Mexican LFC, even a fraudulent one, is treated as a valid credential if it appears legitimate. A driver who purchased a digital LFC for $2,500 from a contact in Mexico City can present it to a U.S. motor carrier as proof of qualification. Unless that carrier takes the extraordinary step of verifying the license in Mexico’s SCT database and cross-referencing the CURP, an 18-character personal identification code unique to each Mexican citizen, there is no practical way to distinguish the fraud from the real thing.

Texas tried to close this gap. In 2023, the state legislature unanimously passed SB 672, requiring foreign CDL holders operating outside border counties to possess valid U.S. work authorization documents. The law classified both Mexican and Canadian CDLs as government records, giving prosecutors grounds to charge possession of a fraudulent LFC as tampering with a government record. Enforcement of the new law reduced crashes in Texas. But it also pushed the operators out of state, to Colorado, to Pennsylvania, to California, to Washington, where they found more permissive environments and, in some cases, the opportunity to trade their fraudulent Mexican LFC for a genuine American CDL.

AB 60, Driver’s Licenses for All, and the Gateway to a CLP

California’s Assembly Bill 60, signed into law in 2013 and effective January 2015, allows undocumented immigrants to obtain a California driver’s license without proof of legal presence in the United States. The applicant needs proof of identity, which can include a Mexican passport, a Mexican Federal Electoral Card, or a foreign consular ID, and proof of California residency, which can be established with documents as informal as a cell phone bill, a letter from a nonprofit, or an attestation from a faith-based organization.

More than one million AB 60 licenses have been issued since the program’s inception. The licenses bear the notation “Federal Limits Apply” and cannot be used for federal identification purposes. And critically, AB 60 does not authorize the issuance of a commercial driver’s license. A CDL in California still requires a valid Social Security number.

That is the letter of the law. But the letter and the reality occupy different zip codes.

What AB 60 does provide is a state-issued identity document. It creates a documented residency. It establishes a person in a system. While the license itself cannot be upgraded to a CDL, it provides the bureaucratic foundation on which other credentials can be stacked. An individual with an AB 60 license has passed both the knowledge and driving tests. They have established residency. They have a government-issued photo ID with an address. For someone seeking to navigate the patchwork of state CDL programs, particularly the non-domiciled CDL pathway, that foundation is the first brick in the wall.

The same principle applies in Minnesota, where Governor Tim Walz signed the Driver’s Licenses for All bill in March 2023, effective October 1 of that year. The law removed the requirement to prove legal presence in the United States for a standard Class D license. An estimated 81,000 undocumented immigrants in Minnesota became eligible. The law includes strict privacy protections prohibiting the Minnesota Department of Public Safety from sharing applicant information with federal immigration authorities.

Washington state has followed a similar trajectory. Before the 2025 federal crackdown, Washington was issuing non-domiciled CDLs with what federal auditors later characterized as grossly insufficient verification. In one case identified by the FMCSA, Washington authorized a non-domiciled CDL to a Ukrainian citizen without verifying the individual’s lawful presence in the United States. An internal review discovered that 685 non-domiciled drivers were incorrectly given regular CDLs or learner’s permits rather than limited-term credentials.

The pattern across these states is not identical, but the architecture is the same: create an accessible entry point for a state-issued identity document, build privacy walls that prevent federal immigration authorities from accessing the resulting data, and then fail to adequately police the pathways between that entry-level document and the commercial credentials that allow someone to operate 80,000 pounds of steel at 65 miles per hour.

‘No Name Given’ and the Identity Verification Insanity 

In September 2025, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt posted a photograph on X showing a New York state CDL seized during Operation Guardian, a joint operation between the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and ICE along Interstate 40. The CDL listed the driver’s first name as “No Name Given.” The operation resulted in the apprehension of 125 undocumented immigrants from nine countries operating commercial vehicles.

The image detonated on social media. But the reality behind it is both more nuanced and more damning than the viral moment suggested.

In many cultures, Afghanistan, Indonesia, parts of South Asia, and the Middle East, individuals use a single name. There is no surname, no given name, and no family name division. When these individuals present identity documents at an American DMV, the documents may list only one name, with the first-name field left blank or populated with “No Name Given.” California DMV policy requires clerks to transcribe names exactly as they appear on the presented identity documents. If the birth certificate or passport says “No Name Given” in the first-name field, that is what goes on the license.

The policy is defensible in isolation. The problem is what it reveals about the broader system. If a state is issuing CDLs, credentials that under the Real ID Act are supposed to represent some of the most secure identity documents in the nation, credentials that in their REAL ID-compliant form bear a star indicating the holder has been vetted to enter a nuclear facility, to individuals whose identity documents cannot populate a first-name field, the question is not whether mononyms are culturally legitimate. The question is whether the identity verification process actually verifies anything.

Federal auditors apparently concluded it was not. The FMCSA audit that prompted Secretary Duffy’s September 2025 emergency action found that California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington all exhibited “systemic non-compliance” in their CDL issuance patterns. California alone had 62,000 unexpired non-domiciled CLPs and CDLs in its system. More than 25 percent of those reviewed were improperly issued. Some licenses are extended four years beyond the expiration of the holder’s legal authorization to be in the United States. In one case, California issued a CDL with school bus and passenger bus endorsements to a Brazilian national whose legal presence had already expired.

Pennsylvania, the state that issued the non-domiciled CDL shown in the image at the top of this article, was identified as one of the six states with licensing patterns inconsistent with federal regulations. Over 12,000 active non-domiciled CDLs exist in the Pennsylvania system. FMCSA issued eight mandatory corrective actions to the state, including an immediate pause on all non-domiciled CDL issuance and a full internal audit of every transaction.

Duffy’s Emergency and the Court’s Pause

On September 26, 2025, Secretary Duffy announced an emergency interim final rule that immediately restricted non-domiciled CDL eligibility to holders of H-2A agricultural worker visas, H-2B temporary worker visas, or E-2 treaty investor visas. Employment Authorization Documents alone, the work permits that had previously been sufficient, would no longer qualify. The rule required states to use the USCIS SAVE database to verify every applicant’s immigration status, mandated in-person renewals, and required states to maintain documentation for at least two years.

The rule affected approximately 200,000 active non-domiciled CDL holders and 20,000 CLP holders. FMCSA estimated that only about 6,000 drivers annually would qualify under the new restrictions, a roughly 97 percent reduction in the eligible applicant pool.

“What our team has discovered should disturb and anger every American,” Duffy said. Licenses to operate a massive, 80,000-pound truck are being issued to dangerous foreign drivers, often times illegally. This is a direct threat to the safety of every family on the road, and I won’t stand for it.”

California was given 30 days to comply or face withholding of $160 million in federal highway funds in the first year, with the amount doubling in year two. Washington suspended all non-domiciled CDL processing. Colorado, South Dakota, Oregon, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Georgia, and others followed with pauses of their own.

Then the courts intervened. On November 13, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a stay pending review, preventing the interim final rule from taking effect until further notice. States were technically free to resume issuing non-domiciled CDLs under the pre-existing regulatory framework. But many did not. California, Washington, Texas, Colorado, South Dakota, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New York remain subject to corrective action plans that require them to demonstrate compliance with pre-existing federal rules before resuming issuance.

The legal limbo is precisely the kind of environment in which fraud thrives. The rules are unclear. The enforcement is inconsistent. The political pressure cuts in multiple directions. And every day, freight still needs to move.

How the Doors Connect

What makes this crisis so intractable is that each of these problems, the mail-order Mexican CDL, the state license-for-all programs, the non-domiciled CDL pipeline, the “No Name Given” identity gap, and the unenforced cabotage rules, does not exist in isolation. They form an ecosystem.

Consider the path. A Central American national enters the United States without documentation. He establishes residency in California and obtains an AB 60 driver’s license using a consular ID and a cell phone bill. He now has a state-issued photo ID. He obtains a work permit through an asylum claim or other immigration proceeding. He now qualifies for a non-domiciled commercial learner’s permit. He passes the CDL knowledge test, takes a skills test at a third-party testing facility, and obtains a non-domiciled CDL.

Or consider the alternative path. The same individual never enters the formal system. He purchases a Mexican LFC for $2,500 from a contact reached through a WhatsApp group. Because the United States recognizes Mexican CDLs under the USMCA reciprocity agreement, a motor carrier hires him to drive. He operates not within the border commercial zone, but across the interior, because no one enforces cabotage rules. If stopped by state law enforcement, he presents the digital LFC. The officer, without access to Mexico’s SCT verification system or training on how to spot the telltale signs of fraud, the garage-door photo, the mismatched CURP characters, the fabricated verification website, has no mechanism to distinguish the document from a legitimate one.

Or consider the legislative path. In October 2025, Representative Beth Van Duyne of Texas introduced the Protecting America’s Roads Act, which would codify Duffy’s emergency restrictions, end reciprocal recognition of Mexican and Canadian CDLs unless authorized by statute, limit non-citizen CDL terms to the shorter of the I-94 expiration or one year, and authorize 287(g) agencies to report unlawful CDL operators. The Texas Department of Public Safety has separately petitioned FMCSA to amend 49 CFR § 383.23 to remove reciprocal recognition entirely, requiring all foreign CDL holders operating domestically to obtain a non-domiciled CDL with proper work authorization.

These are the right ideas. But they arrive years late and against a backdrop of court stays, state resistance, and the relentless economic pressure of a freight market distorted by the very practices the reforms target. Carriers built on non-domiciled CDL labor, operators who survived the Great Freight Recession by hiring drivers willing to run 1,000 miles in a day, sleep in the truck, accept below-market rates, and ignore hours-of-service rules, are not going to restructure their businesses because of a stayed interim final rule.

Whats Next

The honest answer is that no one knows. The D.C. Circuit stay means the emergency rule is frozen. The corrective action plans for the six identified states create a patchwork of suspended issuance. The Protecting America’s Roads Act has been introduced but not passed. The State Department paused H-2B visa processing for commercial truck drivers in August 2025, further constraining the legal labor pipeline while doing nothing to address the illegal labor market.

Meanwhile, the Mexican mail-order CDL business continues to operate. The digital LFC can be purchased worldwide. The informal networks that connect buyers in American cities to sellers in Mexican government offices, former government offices, or people who have purchased digital infrastructure from government offices are not affected by American regulatory action. They are affected by Mexican law enforcement action, which has been minimal.

What would actually fix this is not complicated in concept, though it is enormously difficult in execution. End reciprocal recognition of foreign CDLs for all domestic operations, full stop. Require every driver operating a commercial vehicle on American roads to hold an American CDL issued through a verified, standardized process that includes SAVE verification, English-language proficiency testing at the point of CDL examination, and biometric identity confirmation. Fund FMCSA enforcement of cabotage rules so that the $10,000 fine authority it already possesses becomes a deterrent rather than a dead letter. Mandate that state DMVs cannot issue any CDL, domiciled or non-domiciled, to an applicant whose identity document cannot populate a legal first and last name through primary source verification. And build a unified federal database of all non-domiciled CDLs with real-time status tracking.

None of this requires new technology. It requires political will, state compliance, international coordination, and the kind of sustained regulatory attention that the trucking industry has been denied for decades, while the aviation industry receives as a matter of course. The FAA does not allow foreign nationals to purchase pilot certificates by mail. It should not be this easy to purchase the credentials to operate a vehicle that weighs more than a loaded school bus.

The license in the photograph that prompted this article, a Pennsylvania non-domiciled CDL, Class A, issued to a foreign national, marked “Limited Term”, is not, by itself, evidence of fraud. It may be entirely legitimate. But it is a symbol of a system that has lost the ability to distinguish the legitimate from the fraudulent, the qualified from the dangerous, and the documented from the disappeared. When a government issues a license to operate an 80,000-pound vehicle to a person whose name it cannot verify, whose work authorization it does not track, and whose driving competence it outsources to a third-party tester it does not audit, it has not issued a license. It has issued a prayer.

On American highways, prayers are not an adequate safety plan.

2025 in Review: Deregulation, Stepped-Up Enforcement, and Safety as a Policy Tool

Scopelitis

From a regulatory standpoint, 2025 was not defined by sweeping new trucking rules but instead by how the federal government chose to act: deregulating selectively, enforcing aggressively, and increasingly using safety as justification for broader objectives.

Those three dynamics explain far more about the year than any single rulemaking — and they set the stage for what carriers should expect in 2026.

Deregulation: Real, but Narrow

The Trump Administration made deregulation an operating principle in 2025 by issuing its 10-1 deregulatory executive order just 10 days into the President’s second term. FMCSA and other regulatory agencies quickly followed suit. In the case of FMCSA, rather than pursuing controversial rollbacks, the agency focused on updating federal regulations to meet the reality of trucking in 2025, potentially reducing administrative burden without reopening core safety debates.

Proposals addressed issues such as the definition of a DOT Accident, electronic documentation, outdated certification requirements, and limited reporting obligations. The relief is targeted and modest. Carriers should view deregulation as margin improvement, not a wholesale shift in compliance expectations.

Enforcement: Where the Pressure Shifted

While rulemaking slowed, enforcement accelerated.

FMCSA significantly increased scrutiny of electronic logging devices, removing nearly 30 ELDs from the registry and rolling out stronger vetting aimed at fraud, white-labeling, and tampered systems. State strike forces reinforced that focus, uncovering widespread manipulation of records of duty status, including the use of ghost drivers and altered logs.

Entry-level driver training enforcement followed the same trajectory. Thousands of training providers were removed from the Training Provider Registry, with many more flagged for noncompliance. CDL mills are now a clear enforcement priority.

The takeaway for carriers is simple: fewer new rules did not mean more tolerance. In many areas, enforcement expectations tightened, laying bare the monumental task of policing the trucking industry’s vendors as well as its motor carriers and the contribution of self-certification regimes to ongoing fraud.

Safety as Justification for Other Objectives

Some of the most disruptive developments of 2025 were framed as safety initiatives but were likely driven by broader policy goals. Restrictions on non-domiciled CDLs and renewed emphasis on English Language Proficiency enforcement were advanced under a safety rationale, while also aligning with a broader immigration enforcement strategy. State responses were uneven, litigation followed quickly, and some issues remain unresolved. This heightened scrutiny is already affecting roadside enforcement, investigations, and driver availability.

What to Expect in 2026

The environment in 2026 is likely to be a continuation of 2025, with potentially higher stakes.

Deregulation will continue, but primarily through narrow, low-risk changes. Carriers should not expect broad relief from core safety and compliance obligations. These deregulatory moves could also make way for some additional regulations under the 10-1 EO. After all, FMCSA has some unfinished business to tend to in the form of its Safety Fitness Determination rulemakings and actions on automated driving, ELD specifications/certification, and automatic emergency braking.

Enforcement will remain the primary policy tool highlighted by greater use of data-driven targeting, technology-enabled inspections, and intensified oversight of ELDs and driver training providers. To this end, CSA reform may come to fruition, and efforts to tie CSA data more directly to carrier safety ratings may continue. At the same time, FMCSA faces a structural reality: regulating a growing industry with limited staff and imperfect data. That reality favors automation, prioritization, and scalable enforcement models.

Finally, the debate will continue on the efficacy of broader immigration related proposals in improving motor carrier safety through reduced crashes.

Bottom Line

For carriers, the lesson from 2025 is clear. Regulatory relief and enforcement pressure are not opposites — they are complementary tools.  This year, success will depend less on tracking new rules and more on managing enforcement exposure, data quality, and operational discipline.

Denuclearization: EFFECTIVE Training

Doug Marcello

There is a painful irony embedded in every nuclear verdict involving negligent training.

The company trained. They held the sessions. They logged the hours. They filed the paperwork. They checked every box their compliance department put in front of them.

And the plaintiff’s attorney stood in front of the jury and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, they knew this driver had problems. They knew. And their answer was a generic video.”

That’s the irony. The training they did became the evidence against them. Not the absence of training—its inadequacy.

This is the negligent training problem, and it is the softest leg of the plaintiff’s triad. It’s also the one most fleets can fix fastest—if they’re willing to admit that what they’ve been doing doesn’t work.

The Forgetting Curve Is Not a Theory

I recently interviewed Dr. Gina Anderson, a doctor of education and founder of Luma Brighter Learning, about what the trucking industry gets fundamentally wrong about training.

She didn’t sugarcoat it.

Within the first hour of hearing content, most people forget nearly half of it. That’s the forgetting curve—established neuroscience, backed by decades of research. And the industry’s standard training model is designed to maximize it.

Three days of passive onboarding. Generic content. Everyone in the same room getting the same information regardless of experience level. Then radio silence until the annual refresher—or until somebody has an incident and gets a corrective video.

“I told them that. They should remember it.” Dr. Anderson hears this constantly from safety directors. But that’s not how the brain works. It’s not even close to how the brain works.

The Experienced Driver Problem

Here’s something that should give every fleet executive pause: the drivers with the most experience are sometimes the ones who need the most training.

Dr. Anderson explains this through neuroscience. The brain builds neural scaffolds through association. When information is tied to an emotional experience or a long-held memory, those connections are powerful. They’re also stubborn. If a veteran driver learned a technique 20 years ago that’s now outdated, that old association doesn’t just fade—it actively resists new information.

She compares it to eyewitness misidentification. People in police lineups sometimes identify the wrong person with absolute certainty because their memory is built on association, not accuracy. The same mechanism is at work when a veteran driver insists they’re doing something correctly because “that’s how I’ve always done it.”

Onboarding a new driver and re-training a 25-year veteran require fundamentally different approaches. One-size-fits-all doesn’t account for this. It can’t.

Five Principles of Training That Actually Works

Dr. Anderson’s framework isn’t theoretical. It’s grounded in learning science and already being implemented by forward-thinking fleets. The principles:

1. Individualization. Assess prior knowledge and behavioral data before training begins. AI can build tailored learning paths based on performance data, driving history, and behavioral indexes. The technology to do this exists today. The barrier is adoption, not capability.
2. Continuous delivery. The brain needs seven-plus exposures to build reliable neural connections. Effective training delivers content in spaced intervals across varied formats—not in a single dump. Timing matters too: some people are most receptive early morning, others late at night. Delivering education when the learner is most engaged dramatically improves retention.
3. Proactive intervention. The industry’s default is reactive: incident occurs, corrective video sent. But sending a speeding video to a driver who already knows not to speed doesn’t change behavior. Proactive training identifies patterns in performance data and addresses them before they become incidents—and before they become exhibits in litigation.
4. Authenticity. This is Dr. Anderson’s doctoral research area. Authentic learning targets the individual’s specific, current context. A generic parking lot video is forgettable. A just-in-time simulation of the actual parking lot the driver is heading to—informed by their readiness to change, their motivational profile, and the specific hazards of that location—that’s an experience the brain retains.
5. Connection over content. True micro-learning engages all five interaction modes. The most powerful—and most neglected—is learner-to-self: mindfulness and awareness. Where is the driver’s mind when they’re driving? Are they present, or are they thinking about being away from their family? This is the level of engagement that actually changes behavior. Six-minute videos don’t reach it.

The Courtroom Test

Everything above matters for one simple reason beyond safety: it’s what the courtroom demands.

Plaintiff attorneys attacking negligent training don’t need to prove you didn’t train. They need to prove you didn’t train effectively. They need to show the jury that your training was generic when it should have been individualized. That it was a one-time event when it should have been continuous. That it was reactive when the data showed you should have been proactive.

Check-the-box training gives them everything they need.

Data-driven, AI-founded training takes it away.

When your training platform generates objective evidence—the individualized learning path, the performance data that informed it, the spaced reinforcement schedule, the proactive interventions, the measurable outcomes—you’re not defending with a binder of sign-in sheets. You’re defending with data.

That’s the shift from subjective expert opinion to objective evidence. That’s AI defense.

One of Dr. Anderson’s clients lived this. They switched from check-the-box to science-based, authentic, individualized training. When they went to court, they didn’t say “we trained them.” They said “let us show you what we did.” A multi-million-dollar exposure resolved for $250,000.

The Denuclearization Thesis

This is the first installment in the Denuclearization series. The thesis is straightforward:

Nuclear verdicts in trucking litigation are built on the plaintiff’s triad: negligent hiring, negligent training, and negligent supervision. Each leg is an attack vector. Each leg can be reinforced or dismantled with objective, AI-driven evidence.

Training is where most fleets are most vulnerable—and where the fix is most immediately available.

The learning science is established. The AI technology is operational. Platforms that can deliver individualized, continuous, proactive, authentic training—and generate defensible evidence of it—exist right now.

The question for every fleet executive, safety director, and risk manager is simple: Are you training to check a box, or are you training to produce results?

One approach feeds the nuclear verdict machine. The other dismantles it.

That’s denuclearization.

See the full interview with Dr. Anderson at TransportCenter YouTube or the podcast at TransportCenter Podcast

How to Combat Employees Who Use GPS Jammers

Malcolm Rosenfeld

Thousands of businesses across the United States have a GPS problem. Employees have learned how to mess with GPS.

GPS spoofing and GPS jamming devices have become inexpensive and easy to use. For as little as $10, delivery drivers and long-haul truckers can disguise their locations, so dispatchers won’t know they are taking long breakfast breaks or having a tryst at the motel 6.

Teenagers have learned how to use GPS jammers to block their parents’ tracking apps and for cheating at Pokémon Go. Nefarious drug runners and human traffickers spoof border patrol drones. And dodgy freight companies can use GPS spoofers and jammers to change the time stamps on arriving or departing cargo.

As we’ll explore in more detail a little later, all of these activities violate Federal law, but they are a reality of living in the 2020s. These disruptions not only affect their targets; they can also affect anyone using GPS in the vicinity.

What Is a GPS Jammer?

So, what is a GPS jammer, exactly, and how do they work?

A GPS jammer is a device that uses radio frequencies to transmit a signal that blocks, jams, or interferes with GPS systems. These devices disrupt all aspects of GPS including navigation and tracking.

The devices are usually small, and most of them are a snap to install. All a user has to do is to plug them into the car charger port and make sure the device is close to the GPS tracker. This way it can interfere with the signal.

GPS jammers and spoofers take less than 30 seconds to power up. They can be taken out and plugged again as needed, covering up evidence of wrongdoing. This makes them attractive to criminals and unreliable employees (and delinquent teenagers) who don’t want employers, parents, or the police to track them.

GPS jammers are easy to find. Do a search in Google for GPS jammers, and you can find numerous websites where you can purchase them including an e-commerce site called Jammer Store.

Are GPS Jammers Illegal?

So, are GPS jammers and spoofers legal?

If you go to the US government’s GPS website’s page on jamming, the first thing you will see is:

“Federal law prohibits the operation, marketing, or sale of any type of jamming equipment that interferes with authorized radio communications, including cellular and Personal Communication Services (PCS), police radar, and Global Positioning Systems (GPS).”

There are very good reasons it is illegal to interfere with GPS devices. Emergency medical services, fire departments, and the police depend on them. So does the military. Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hackers have interfered with GPS tracking of international shipments. The likelihood of your employee taking a break in the middle of the day getting mistaken for a foreign agent are, let’s be for real, very small, but the consequences to that employee and your business could be enormous.

What are the Consequences of GPS Jamming?

Everyone who uses a GPS jammer is breaking the law, but not everyone who uses a GPS jammer is using them to hide otherwise illegal activity. Some businesses use cell phone jammers to create a quiet zone, for example, a movie theater that wants to curtail cell phone usage. But the reason jammers, including GPS jammers, are illegal has to do with safety.

As we mentioned earlier but it bears repeating, GPS and cell phone jammers can interfere with emergency services like 9-1-1, ambulances, firefighters, and police. Furthermore, GPS jamming devices have interfered with airplane navigation.

For example, in 2015, planes landing at Northeast Philadelphia Airport were losing their GPS signal from 1 mile away from the airport. The FCC discovered that a truck driver in a parking lot was using a jammer to disable a tracking device on his truck that he didn’t know was illegal. The FCC agent immediately confiscated the device and destroyed it with a sledgehammer. Luckily for the trucker, the FCC didn’t fine him for using the device, because others haven’t gotten off so easily.

Do Drivers Want to Know How to Jam GPS?

In another aviation incident in Newark, the Federal Aviation Administration filed a complaint with the FCC that something was interfering with the signals from the GPS tracking system at the Newark Liberty International Airport. An FCC investigation discovered that a man named Gary Bojczak was using a GPS jamming device to hide from his employer. The FCC fined the man $31,875.

From the above incidents, it’s evident that some drivers are using GPS jammers to block fleet tracking and other GPS tracking devices, but is it a significant problem? In 2016 NBC News reported that according to a 2012 UK study known as the Sentinel Project, 20 roadside monitors found between 50 and 450 daily instances of jamming across the UK. 9 out of 10 of those jammers were employed by fleet drivers or truckers. A smaller 2014 study by Rohde & Schwarz discovered that every 3rd or 4th truck on a major highway near Portland International Airport in Oregon was broadcasting at the same frequency as GPS, meaning these trucks were potentially blocking GPS tracking.

However, the US trucking association says they have found no evidence to show that large numbers of truck drivers are using GPS jammers, and the Sentinel project found that it was drivers of smaller vehicles like delivery and service vehicles, as well as taxis that were the primary type of employee to use GPS jammers, not truckers. That’s because most truck drivers are well aware of the regulations and penalties they can incur for using a jamming device to manipulate their driving logs or to hide from employers.

How Do I Know an Employee Is Using a GPS Jammer?

The good news is if you have one or more employees who try to use a GPS jammer to disrupt your fleet tracking system, you’ll know. While your drivers might think the illegal jammers make them invisible, what they do instead is to attract more attention to their behavior.

If an employee is using a GPS jammer to disrupt the GPS signal, it will appear on the live tracking map or trip history map as an interrupted or missing trip. If they plug their jammer in during just part of the trip, you’ll see a line from when the jamming started to when the device was turned off. Some later model GPS tracking devices even have GPS jamming detection. Plus you can also create an exception rule that looks for GPS signal faults and triggers an alert or email when GPS interference occurs.

Once you detect an employee has disrupted GPS tracking, you can take appropriate disciplinary measures. You also have a record of the GPS jamming for disciplinary action such as firing the offending employees for cause.

Final Thoughts on GPS Jammers and Employees

Many people don’t realize that they are breaking federal law when they use a GPS jammer. But they do know they are breaking work rules when they use them to hide their locations from your dispatch office during working hours. Employees need to know that the use of these devices can result in more than just the termination of their employment.

(For the tech readers, this youtube video gives the “behind the scenes” of spoofing. It goes beyond the plug-in devices.)

Master the Art of GPS Spoofing: Tricks to Fake Your Phone’s Location

Uncover apps and techniques to change locations on iPhone and Android for fun and practical uses

Tim Fisher

What to Know

• You can change your Android phone’s GPS location using a free app from the Google Play Store.
• To spoof your iPhone location, use a desktop program like 3uTools on a Windows or Mac computer.
• Be careful, as fake GPS can change your location for all apps, like maps and weather apps.

This article explains how to spoof a GPS location on your phone. In most cases, faking the location on your iPhone or Android affects every location-based app on your device.

Spoof Android Location

Search for “fake GPS” on Google Play, and you’ll find many options, some free and others not, and some requiring root access.

One app that doesn’t need you to root your phone—so long as you’re using Android 6.0 or newer—is called Fake GPS Location Spoofer, and it’s my favorite choice for changing my phone’s location. It’s straightforward to use, as you’ll see:

The information below should apply no matter who made your Android phone: Samsung, Google, Huawei, Xiaomi, etc.

1. Install Fake GPS Location Spoofer. It works on Android 4.4 and up.
2. Open the app and accept any prompts you see. You’ll need to tap Allow to let the app send notifications, and While using the app to give it location access.
3. Tap Accept if you see a terms prompt, then choose Enable from the message about mock locations at the bottom.
4. Choose Developer Settings to open that screen, tap Select mock location app toward the very end of the page that opened, and then select FakeGPS Free.

If you don’t see this screen, turn on developer mode and then return to this step. In some Android versions, you have to put a check in the box next to the Allow mock locations option on the Developer options screen.

1. Use the back button to return to the app. Search for the location you want to fake on your phone (you can also drag the map to position the pointer). If you’re creating a route, tap and hold on the map to place markers.
2. Tap the play button at the bottom of the screen to enable the fake GPS setting.

You can close the app and open Google Maps or another location app to see if your GPS location has been spoofed. To get your real location back, press the stop button.

If you’re interested in trying a different Android location spoofer, we’ve confirmed that the following free location-changing apps work much like FakeGPS Free: Fake GPS, Fly GPS, and Fake GPS Location. Another method is to use Xposed Framework to install a location-spoofing app.

Spoof iPhone Location

Faking your iPhone location isn’t as easy as on an Android device—you can’t just download an app. However, software makers have built desktop programs that make this easy.

Fake iPhone or iPad Location With 3uTools

3uTools is the best way to spoof the location of your iPhone or iPad because the software is free, and I’ve confirmed that it works with iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, so it’s likely also compatible with other versions of these operating systems.

1. Download and install 3uTools. This was tested on Windows 11, but it works in other versions of Windows as well, plus macOS.
2. With your iPhone or iPad plugged in, select Toolbox at the top of the program, and then VirtualLocation from that screen.

1. Select somewhere on the map, or use the search bar, to choose where you want to fake your location.
2. Select Modify virtual location, and then OK when you see the “succeeded” message.

If you see a prompt about Developer Mode, follow the steps on the screen to turn that on.

Restart your device to pull real GPS data again.

Fake iPhone or iPad Location With iTools

Another way to change your iPhone’s location without jailbreaking is by using iTools from ThinkSky. It runs on Windows and macOS and can simulate movement, but it isn’t free indefinitely. It works with iOS 16 and older versions.

1. Download and install iTools. You might have to select Free Trial at some point before it fully opens.
2. Plug your device into your computer and navigate to Toolbox > Virtual Location.

1. If you see this screen, select the image in the Developer Mode section to agree to download the iOS Developer Disk Image file.
2. Search for a location from the top of the screen, and then select Go to find it on the map.
3. Select Move here to instantly fake your location.

The iTools website has more information on how to use the map. It can also simulate a route.

You can now exit the Virtual Location window in iTools as well as the program itself. If you’re asked whether to stop the simulation, you can choose No to make sure that your fake GPS location stays even when you unplug your phone.

To get your real location back, return to the map and select Stop Simulation. You can also reboot your device to immediately start using its real location again.

Remember that you can fake your phone’s location with iTools only within the 24-hour trial period; you’ll need to use an entirely different computer if you want to run the trial again. The fake location will remain as long as you don’t restart your device.

Why Would You Fake Your Location?

There are lots of situations where you might set up a fake GPS location, both for fun and for other reasons.

Maybe you want to change your location so that something like a dating app thinks you’re a hundred miles away, perfect if you’re planning to move somewhere and want to get ahead of the dating game.

Spoofing your location might also come into play when using a location-based game like Pokémon GO. Instead of having to travel several miles away to pick up a different Pokémon type, you could trick your phone into telling the game that you’re already there, and it will assume your fake location is accurate.

Other reasons to set up a mock GPS location might be if you want to “travel” to Tokyo and check in to a restaurant you’ve never actually been to, or visit a famous landmark to trick your Facebook friends into thinking you’re on an extravagant vacation.

You can also use your fake location to fool your family or friends in your location-sharing app, to hide your real location from apps that request it, and even to set your real location if GPS satellites aren’t doing a great job at finding it for you.

Changing your GPS location doesn’t hide your phone number, mask your IP address, or alter other things you do from your device.

GPS Spoofing Problems

Before getting started, please know that although it can be a lot of fun to fake your location, it’s not always helpful. Plus, because GPS spoofing isn’t a built-in option, it isn’t just a click away to get it going, and location fakers don’t always work for every app that reads your location.

If you install one of these apps on your phone to use it for, say, a video game, you’ll find that other apps that you want to use your real location with will also use the fake location. The game might very well use your spoofed address to your advantage, but if you open your navigation app to get directions somewhere, you’ll have to either turn off the location spoofer or manually adjust your starting location.

The same is true for other things like checking in to restaurants, staying current on your family-based GPS locator, checking the surrounding weather, etc. If you’re tricking your location system-wide for everything on your phone, it will affect the location in all your location-based apps.

Some websites falsely claim that using a VPN will change your GPS location. This is not true for most VPN apps, as their primary purpose is to hide your public IP address. Only a few VPNs include a GPS override function.

FAQ

• How do you share your location on iPhone?

Open the Find My app and select People > + > Share My Location. Enter the name or number of the contact you want to share your location with and select Send. Choose the amount of time you want to share your location (one hour, until the end of the day, or indefinitely) and select OK.

• How do you turn off your location on iPhone?

If you’re concerned with privacy on your iPhone, you can tell it to stop tracking your location. Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services and flip the toggle to Off.

• How do you find the location of an iPhone?

Open the Find My app, select Devices, and then choose the device you want to locate. If the phone can be located, it appears on the map. If it can’t, you will see “Offline” under its name. Its last known location is displayed for up to 24 hours.

• How can you see the location history on an iPhone?

Your iPhone keeps track of significant places you’ve visited, and you can review these. Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > System Services > Significant Locations.

• How do you change the weather location on an iPhone?

Tap and hold your finger on the Weather widget, and then select Edit “Weather”. Tap My Location and then choose a new one from the list that pops up, or use the search bar. The new location is now the default.

• How do you share a location from iPhone to Android?

Open Contacts, select the contact, and then choose Share My Location. You can also share your location using Google Maps: Menu > Location sharing > Share location.