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CINCINNATI, OH – A young man killed by an Uzbek truck driver earlier this year in Ohio, along with several instances of illegal immigrant truck drivers involved in fatal crashes, has sparked a larger conversation in southwest Ohio about fraud, crime, immigration and how gaps in trucking industry oversight are putting Americans at risk.
Tobias “Toby” Forsythe, a 21-year-old goalkeeper from Ohio on the University of Massachusetts Lowell men’s soccer team, was killed July 5 when authorities say a semi-truck driven by 42-year-old Uzbek national Bekhzod Asrarov, who entered the country under the Biden administration’s diversity visa lottery program, rear-ended Forsythe’s Honda Accord on Interstate 71 in Madison County, Ohio.
It was later determined, according to court documents, that Asrarov could not speak or understand English well enough to communicate with responding state troopers without the use of Google Translate, despite holding an Ohio commercial driver’s license, and that he allegedly removed a dashboard camera from his truck after the fatal crash in an effort to conceal or destroy evidence.
“We cannot let truckers like Asrarov, who can’t read our road signs or speak to law enforcement, drive 80,000-pound rigs on America’s highways,” Transportation Secretary Sean posted on X after the crash.
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The death of college soccer player Tobias “Toby” Forsythe, who was allegedly struck and killed by truck driver Bekhzod Asrarov (pictured) in Ohio, has fueled debate over commercial trucking safety. (Madison County Sheriff’s Office ; Kevin Carter/Getty Images)
In southwest Ohio, a researcher known as Nodawolf has been sounding the alarm to his growing follower count about a vast network of trucking companies, many of them owned or operated by Uzbek nationals, that have popped up in communities like Loveland, Middletown, and Maineville, where Asrarov resides, in recent years and could be contributing to the unsafe practices that took the life of Forsythe, and many others across the country.
Nodawolf, who Digital granted anonymity due to the death threats he’s received from his online reporting, said his research has focused on what he describes as an interconnected network of Uzbek-linked trucking companies in southwest Ohio, including companies that have donated money toward construction of a local Islamic center, according to the center’s own website.
“All of them have English violations and have manipulated ELDs,” Nodawolf said, referring to electronic logging devices that track a trucker’s driving hours and are intended to enforce federal limits on how long drivers can stay behind the wheel.
The Islamic Center, located in Maineville, told Digital that a “charitable contribution or participation in a community fundraising activity, by itself, should not be interpreted as evidence of an ownership, employment, contractual, commercial, or other business relationship with the Islamic Center or its leadership.”
A Digital review identified hundreds of trucking companies and other trucking entities registered in Maineville and surrounding southwest Ohio communities, including dozens that were registered in recent years. A separate review of companies identified as connected to the local Uzbek community found serious FMCSA safety violations, including drivers cited for failing English-proficiency requirements and other federal trucking violations.
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“This really concerns me, you know, as a father,” Nodawolf told Digital. “I mean, it’s clearly obvious that they either don’t understand our laws, they don’t care about our laws, or they know our laws and they’re taking advantage of it.”
Nodawolf has reported on Uzbek trucking networks communicating on the social media platform Telegram. One of those Telegram channels, named “UzbegimAmerica,” has routinely mentioned the Uzbek community in Maineville. Court documents show the owner of that channel, Farkhod Faiziev, is a suspected illegal immigrant from Uzbekistan.
The Trump administration has made significant progress on the issue of removing foreign truck drivers who pose a danger being removed from the road – including a recent multi-agency operation in Arizona’s Yuma Sector, which led to the arrest of 95 illegal alien truck drivers earlier this month – striking at the heart of human and drug smuggling operations at the U.S. southern border.
The Departments of Homeland Security, Transportation and Justice recently announced a coordinated crackdown on trucking and CDL fraud targeting fraudulent licensing, unauthorized employment, identity-document fraud, shell companies and other criminal activity. The effort includes inspections at more than 200 driving schools across 23 states, investigations based on more than 1,000 leads, enforcement operations targeting illegal immigrants with commercial licenses and a new multi-state DOJ task force focused on trucking-related fraud and roadway safety.
A trucking-industry veteran with decades of experience who spoke to Digital under the condition of anonymity for his safety described a developing fraud scheme popular with immigrant communities known as “chameleon carriers”, a network of trucking companies that appear separate on paper but, he said, share the same drivers, trucks and operations. The arrangement starts when operators establish one company that is “quote-unquote legitimate,” he said, then create additional carriers and authorities while using the same underlying assets across them.
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The point, the industry expert said, is to “spread out their safety liability across multiple companies.” Rather than allowing inspections and violations to pile up under one carrier, he said, the operation can distribute them among multiple motor-carrier authorities.
“If they have 10 inspections and 10 violations across 10 different companies, that doesn’t hurt the safety rating as much,” he said. “But if it was one company that had 10 inspections and 10 violations, that one company is going to get hammered.”
The separate companies can also serve as a contingency plan, he said. If one carrier is shut down, loses insurance or becomes too damaged by safety problems, “they’re able to immediately move all of the equipment and drivers and everything under one of the different companies,” the industry veteran said. “Their operation never stops. There’s no way to shut them down.”
He further alleged the structure can facilitate cargo theft, with a company disappearing after obtaining a high-value shipment while the broader network continues operating through its remaining entities. “They lost one of their shell companies, basically, but they just got $5 million in iPads,” he said.
The industry expert said the model can be particularly dangerous, in his view, because it allows companies to keep operating despite safety problems while allegedly using drivers who may not be legally authorized to work in the United States. He said operators can make that harder to detect by classifying drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, potentially avoiding the ordinary employee I-9 verification process.
“If you’re using a bunch of people from a third-world country that just showed up in the United States as drivers, whether they’re here legally or not, how well do you think they’re going to maintain their equipment and be able to follow the laws?” he said.
Seven of the trucking schools targeted by the Department of Transportation last month are located in Ohio, DOT told last month.
A Notice of Proposed Removal was recently issued by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for Turan CDL School, a Middletown-based company that has advertised CDL training to Uzbek speakers, including advertisements suggesting students could obtain a CDL without first learning English, as well as Google reviews from customers claiming they earned their licenses in as little as one week.
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“There’s ‘what do the rules say’ and then ‘what’s happening on the ground,” Andrew Poliakoff, vice president of the Commercial Vehicle Training Association, told Fox 28 Columbus shortly after the crash that killed Forsythe. “We’re seeing now is that there are a lot of people committing fraud, and engaging in a variety of bad actions issuing commercial driver’s licenses.”
Victor Louis, whose Cincinnati based company Load Secure verifies the identities of drivers entering its network, told Digital that he has seen local advertisements promising prospective truckers a CDL in as little as a week immediately raise red flags.
“Trucking is such an inherently dangerous activity. Essentially, you’re driving a 40-ton missile down the road,” Louis said. “To think that someone is going to be certified to do that within a week, that may or may not speak English, like that doesn’t make any sense.”
Louis said his company is also seeing a significant number of non-domiciled drivers, foreign drivers who hold commercial licenses issued by a U.S. state despite not having their permanent residence in that state. He said roughly 15% to 20% of drivers entering Load Secure’s network fall into that category and estimated the figure could be around 20% among long-haul truckers nationwide.
“Whether they’re here legally or not, I don’t know, but they are essentially foreign nationals,” Louis said. He argued that long-haul trucking can be particularly attractive to migrants because drivers can spend weeks at a time living on the road rather than maintaining a permanent home near their workplace.
Louis said cargo theft and the security of the broader supply chain are among his biggest concerns.
“What we see with that market of non-domiciled drivers is a high propensity of cargo theft, an extremely high propensity,” he said. “It’s wreaking havoc on our supply chain. Number one, it’s extremely dangerous and number two, it is very unsecure. We don’t know if things are being tampered with. This exposes our supply chains.”
The Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles told Digital that it is reviewing the state’s nondomiciled commercial driver’s license holders in coordination with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Of the roughly 5,000 nondomiciled credentials originally issued, about 3,500 remain active, meaning approximately 1,500 are no longer active as the review continues.
On Sept. 16, reported that ICE arrested two Uzbek illegal alien truck drivers in New Jersey as part of nationwide crackdown on fraudulent CDLs.
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“We are starting to go into those thousand leads of fraud, waste and abuse into our trucking industry,” Mullin said in a press conference last month. “We’re going to prioritize going after employees that are suspected of accepting payments to help illegals bypass driver’s license and CDL requirements.”
In Brown County, Ohio, on Sept. 2, an Indian national with a CDL out of California crashed his semi-truck head-on into the car of 50-year-old Brenda Watson, who died at the scene. The driver, Manjit Singh , was later determined to be an illegal immigrant and ICE announced in a press release that a detainer was placed along with a charge of aggravated vehicular homicide.
“One state’s regulatory failure becomes every state’s highway threat,” Ohio attorney Mehek Cooke told News Digital. “Republican governors cannot assume their states were insulated from Biden’s border crisis simply because they opposed his policies.”
Digital reached out to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine’s office for comment.
Last month, ICE launched a tip-line for reporting fraudulent CDL licenses.
“Too many American lives have been lost or permanently changed because illegal aliens who have no business being on our roads have been granted CDLs,” Mullin said in a press release. “ICE and our federal partners, including the Department of Transportation, will be cracking down on CDL fraud so that not one more American life is lost to a reckless illegal alien behind the wheel of a semi-truck.”
