John Brasher's leased truck and trailer from an ill-fated run at Prime Route Transport. John Brashers
- Video evidence shows a Super Ego-linked carrier, Prime Route Transport, manipulating a driver's ELD records to add hours.
- The driver alleges terrible maintenance and safety practices, short pay, and an utter disregard for drivers.
- Given the chance to respond, Prime Route did not deny ELD cheating or skimming driver pay.
The Central Analysis Bureau (CAB), owned by Overdrive's parent company Fusable, coined the term chameleon carrier over a decade ago to highlight risky carriers posing as new entrants.
CAB establishes otherwise hidden links between entities through ownership history, inspections and crashes, and creditors' UCC filings.
The chameleon carrier phenomenon became a national media firestorm when CBS News' 60 Minutes exposed Super Ego's network of carriers' involvement in high-profile fatal crashes, evasion of enforcement, and fleecing of drivers' settlements through predatory lease deals. The segment included a shocking statistic from CAB: Chameleon carriers are four times as likely to get into a crash than others.
The 60 Minutes report also shed light on one of trucking's dark secrets: ELD cheating to gain hours with backend tampering.
60 Minutes quoted a driver saying he'd driven 18 hours in a row while hauling for one of the companies in Super Ego's network. That driver didn't name names in the TV segment, but Overdrive now can.
The inspections record for active carrier Prime Route Transport, which CBS reporting linked to Super Ego, as of late March shows 81 hours-of-service violations in 175 total inspections.
John Brashers failed a drug test while recovering from a surgery, and finding steady truck driving employment has been a challenge. When he signed a lease on a truck to drive for Prime Route, he thought he'd found a lifeline, but what he actually found was a complicated web of companies that obscured his real lessor but found plenty of reasons to dock his pay.
"They figure they can run you over and run you hard," said Brashers of his time at Prime Route. "Why I care is that they’re herding new people in like cattle. Like a revolving door, that’s all it is. They don’t care about the drivers, just as long as someone is in that seat."
Brashers showed paperwork indicating he was leased to Floyd Inc., which he believes is the main carrier entity for the network despite only showing one truck in FMCSA's system. 
Brashers said Prime Route wouldn't even show him his proper lease agreement to dispute settlement checks. John Brashers
Despite that paperwork, Brashers had his settlements signed by Prime Route. He told Overdrive the fleet had him pulling Super Ego trailers and frequently skimmed money out of his settlement checks.
The driver felt he had no choice but to haul for the fleet as he worked through the return to duty steps after the drug test failure.
Prime Route told Overdrive the fleet is "currently leasing some trailers from [Super Ego], but we are in the process of returning all of them, as we do not wish to be associated or categorized as a chameleon carrier.
"Other than the trailer lease, we have no business relationship with them."
Those trailers weren't in good shape, Brashers said. "They don’t care about the maintenance," he added of Prime Route.
When he first got his truck to haul for Prime Route, "it had no oil in it, it needed a headlight and two front tires. There was no way it’d pass DOT inspection," he said. "The tail lights were bungee-corded on. The brakes weren't working on the trailer, so I just had to do what I could with the slack adjusters."
Worst of all, he couldn't get a shop to work on the truck because they'd just tell him "this is Floyd Inc., they don’t wanna ever pay the bill."
CAB's analysis found that Prime Route shared 33 VINs recorded during roadside inspections, representing 44% of the 75 units it reports, with Trytime Transport LLC. Trytime's safety scores were among the worst in trucking that CAB staff had ever seen in late February when they researched Super Ego network companies for CBS (Trytime's authority was revoked in early March). CBS's reporting had tied both Trytime and Prime Route to the Super Ego network.
Brashers said his dispatcher asked him to check in to pick ups as J&A Logistics Transportation LLC, another Super Ego-affiliated chameleon CBS reporting linked to Super Ego. The DOT number for J&A has since gone inactive in the federal Safer system. John Brashers
Prime Route's own category score in the vehicle maintenance area was over 91%, well above the FMCSA's intervention threshold for the category.
ELD cheating allegations at Prime Route
When Brashers started at Prime Route, he heard from other drivers: "don’t worry you’ll have hours to make your loads," he said.
When he was actually under a load and time-crunched, a fleet manager told him to call a designated number to "fix your clock," as Brasher put it.
"I didn't think they could hack into your system, especially when you're driving," said Brashers.
The Prime Route driver showed Overdrive a video of the fleet's ELD management team adding hours to his available drive time above and beyond what regulations allow. Prime Route provided a number to call to change his available hours, and the voice on the phone instructed him to turn off Bluetooth and then turn it back on with his device.
The video below shows the change happen.
When the device reconnected, he had gained additional hours of drive time to complete a haul.
According to Brashers, this wasn't just an option, but an obligation.
"When I'd tell them, 'look this load is not going to make it on time,' they'd say 'no no no, you got enough hours, you gotta get it there.' If your dispatcher wasn’t getting through, the fleet manager would call" the number and get your ELD reset.
"It was kind of like forced, rush loads, they wanted you to get 4,000 miles a week," he said.
"If a company treats you like crap, find something different, someone out there will hire you."
--John Brashers, speaking to drivers stuck in situations like the one he found himself in
Prime Route did reply to an Overdrive request for comment on Brasher's allegations of pay skimming and ELD cheating, and while the fleet said it valued accuracy in reporting, it did not deny any of Brasher's claims.
Brashers recalled getting loaded incorrectly, having to do a 180 and spend three hours in traffic, and then get only a few hours of sleep before heading out again. After that debacle, his settlement check showed he got $600 for the extra miles, but Prime Route took 25% of even that.
The driver also produced settlement documentation showing he'd driven more than 3,400 miles in five days, and after grossing $8,700 for the company, he only took home $633.
Overdrive has reported since July that ELD providers now cold-call owner-ops offering blatantly illegal services. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance has since added a violation code for out-of-service treatment of this sort of "whole cloth" ELD cheating. HOS and this kind of ELD tampering will be a focus of the Roadcheck enforcement blitz next week, May 12-14.
Owner-operators have sent Overdrive Serbian-language postings advertising ELD editing services.
Super Ego, in response to 60 Minutes, claimed that it was not a motor carrier and instead was simply a leasing company. The company gave the statement at this link to the Serbian Times despite claiming it was a U.S.-based company.
Brashers said for drivers stuck in a similar situation, it's time to get out. Not every fleet like Prime Route is bad, but there are certainly bad actors, he said.
"Not all foreigners run a bad company, because I've worked for one for three years and I have a lot of respect for them," said Brashers. "I don’t like that people think they can come over here and take full advantage of people that are struggling and trying to make it. We can do better."
If you or a driver you know is in a similar situation, have them reach out to [email protected] to aide our ongoing reporting.
"You do not have to deal with people like that," Brashers said of Prime Route. "If a company treats you like crap, find something different, someone out there will hire you."
