A fatal semi-truck crash that killed a 21-year-old college soccer player from Ohio in July has called attention to the rapid rise in “chameleon carriers” in the Buckeye State.
Uzbek-owned commercial trucking operations quietly cropped up along with migrant settlements in southern Ohio, providing an easy avenue for foreign nationals from Uzbekistan and elsewhere to obtain a commercial driver’s license and get behind the wheel of a big rig.
The rise of truckers with nondomiciled commercial licenses and sham trucking schools has sparked nationwide debate among trucking industry experts and drawn the ire of the Trump administration.
Over the last year, the U.S. Department of Transportation launched a major effort to crack down on non-domiciled CDLs and truckers who are unqualified to drive big rigs. Federal officials say at least 30 people were killed in crashes involving non-domiciled truckers in 2025.
In southwest Ohio, the tragic death of 21-year-old Tobias “Toby” Forsythe finally exposed the proliferation of sketchy trucking schools and got people talking about suspected fraud and cargo theft, illegal drivers who can’t speak English and lax oversight in the nation’s trucking industry.
Migrants from Uzbekistan have flooded into Butler and Warren counties, transforming the quaint, conservative communities of Maineville, Loveland and even Vice President JD Vance’s hometown of Middletown.
The semi-truck driver involved in the fatal crash is 42-year-old Uzbek national Bekhzod Asrarov, who entered the country under the Biden administration’s diversity visa lottery program. He lives in Maineville, Ohio, and has a commercial driver’s license from Ohio.
The crash occurred after 1:30 a.m. July 5, when Asrarov’s semi-truck rear-ended Forsythe’s Honda Accord on Interstate 71 in Madison County, Ohio.
Forsythe, a goalie for the University of Massachusetts Lowell men’s soccer team, was from Gahanna, Ohio, and died at the scene.
Authorities charged Asrarov with tampering with evidence after investigators said he ripped off the truck’s dashboard camera in an effort to conceal or destroy evidence.
Industry leaders spoke out after the crash and sounded the alarm over ongoing concerns about fraudulent CDL training providers and other shady practices.
“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.”
According to court documents, Asrarov could not speak or understand English when state troopers responded to the scene. Asrarov needed a translator at both the crash scene and the hospital and used Google Translate to communicate with authorities.
“This really concerns me, you know, as a father,” an online researcher and X user who goes by Nodawolf told Fox News 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, who has been sounding the alarm on X, has infiltrated Uzbek trucking networks on the social media platform Telegram. The channel “UzbegimAmerica” regularly talks about the Uzbek community in Maineville.
Court documents show the owner of that channel, Farkhod Faiziev, is a suspected illegal immigrant from Uzbekistan, Fox News reported.
Nodawolf has uncovered an interconnected network of Uzbek-linked trucking companies in southwest Ohio and remains anonymous due to death threats from his online reporting.
“All of them have English violations and have manipulated ELDs,” Nodawolf told Fox.
Electronic logging devices track a trucker’s driving hours and are intended to enforce federal limits on how long drivers can stay behind the wheel.
Various outlets have confirmed hundreds of trucking companies and other trucking entities are registered in Maineville and surrounding southwest Ohio communities.
The New York Post reported the Uzbek-owned commercial trucking companies have raised red flags among local residents. They operate out of shared residential addresses, log millions of annual mileage and allegedly own phantom big rigs.
Locals also report dramatic demographic and infrastructure shifts due to the influx of migrants. One local school district is now 12% non-English speaking students, with most from Central Asia, The Post reported.
A large new mosque is under construction in Maineville, and Uzbek-owned trucking companies have donated money toward its construction, according to locals and the center’s own website.
Maineville has more than 250 active commercial trucking companies registered in the village of just 1,500 residents. Twenty-two residential addresses in Maineville hold two or more trucking companies registered, which is a red flag for so-called “chameleon companies,” according to trucking industry experts.
Residents have reported seeing semi-truck drivers plowing through yards and knocking down mailboxes.
Trucking industry experts also allege it’s a way to facilitate cargo theft because the broader network continues operating even if one company gets shut down.
In a nearly six-minute video, Victor Louis, another trucking industry veteran in Ohio, told Fox News that he has seen local advertisements promising prospective truckers a CDL in as little as a week.
“No one should be able to get their CDL in a week,” Louis said. “Trucking is such an inherently dangerous activity. Essentially, you’re driving a 40-ton missile down the road. To think that someone is going to be certified to do that in a week, that may or may not speak English, that doesn’t make any sense.”
His Cincinnati-based company Load Secure verifies the identities of drivers entering its network. He has similar concerns about trucking fraud, cargo theft and the influx of drivers with non-domiciled CDLs causing danger on the roads.
He said roughly 15% to 20% of drivers entering Load Secure’s network are foreign drivers with non-domiciled CDLs. He estimated the figure could be around 20% among long-haul truckers nationwide.
“What we see with that market of non-domiciled drivers is a high propensity of cargo theft, an extremely high propensity,” Louis told Fox. “It’s wreaking havoc on our supply chain.”
