We Used FMCSA's Own Data to Find 11,135 Shared-Ownership Connections. Here's What Was Hiding in Plain Sight.

FMCSA maintains a public API called MOTUS that returns structured data for every registered motor carrier and broker in the country. For each company, the API provides the names and titles of registered officers, all business addresses (including secondary locations), authority type and status, insurance policy details, and registration history.

Trunk queried this API for 25,863 companies in the FMCSA database (of which approximately 7,900 have active household goods authority) and cross-referenced the results. The output: 11,135 shared-ownership connections between companies that list the same officer. An additional 5,283 connections through shared phone numbers and 2,394 through shared addresses. A total of 19,116 entity links, all derived from data FMCSA already has.

The cross-referencing intentionally includes companies with inactive and revoked authority, not just active ones. This is where fraud detection is most valuable: revoked companies connect to their chameleon successors through shared officers. Limiting the analysis to active companies would miss exactly the patterns that matter most.

Some shared-officer connections are legitimate. Large van line networks (Allied, North American, Mayflower) share corporate officers across dozens of subsidiaries. That is normal industry structure.

But the data also reveals patterns that are not normal. Elad Hasut appears as the registered officer of Handle With Care Moving and Transportation LLC in Tucker, Georgia (147 complaints, authority revoked March 2026). The same name is linked to Logistics Moving Services LLC, Spirit Van Lines, and JCS Moving and Storage. Consumers tracked stolen goods to warehouses operated by these companies in three states. FMCSA's own MOTUS system contains the officer name that connects them.

Joseph Hannouch appears as president of Moving Systems in Fairfield, NJ (145 complaints). Moving Systems shares a warehouse address with three other companies. Hannouch is connected to the El-Ibrahim fraud network. Farah Al-Ibrahim was convicted of wire fraud conspiracy and obtained new FMCSA broker authority while on criminal probation. FMCSA's own systems contain all of these data points.

Damian Hisham Cowell is the registered incorporator of both Handle With Care Moving (revoked) and JCS Moving and Storage (registered five days before Handle With Care was revoked). FMCSA's OP-1 application asks about affiliations with prior carriers. The data to detect this reincarnation was available at the application stage.

Khaled Awad is the registered owner of both Space Moving Vanlines and Premiere Moving and Storage, two of the four companies at 30 Sherwood Lane in Fairfield, NJ. One person, two companies, same warehouse.

Trunk's process is straightforward. For each company in the database, we normalize the officer names, addresses, and phone numbers. We compare them across all 25,863 companies. When two companies share an officer, an address, or a phone number, the system creates a link. When links cluster, a network emerges.

This is not advanced technology. It is basic data matching. The kind of cross-referencing that a single analyst with a spreadsheet could perform, scaled to the full database.

FMCSA has the same data. The MOTUS API that Trunk queried is FMCSA's own system. The officer names, the addresses, the authority records are all maintained by the agency. The question is not whether FMCSA can detect these patterns. The question is whether it does.

The Handle With Care to JCS reincarnation was reported to FMCSA twice with the complete roadmap: same incorporator, same employees, same broker, same location. The agency's response was an automated message directing the reporter to file a consumer complaint. The data to detect the reincarnation was in FMCSA's own MOTUS system before the report was filed.

Trunk's database now contains:

25,863 companies in the FMCSA database (approximately 7,900 with active HHG authority) 24,181 with registered officer names 17,567 confirmed HHG carriers 5,635 confirmed HHG brokers 19,116 entity links (11,139 shared ownership, 5,283 shared phone, 2,394 shared address)

Every one of these data points came from publicly available FMCSA systems. No FOIA requests. No special access. No insider information. Just an API that returns JSON when you query it with a DOT number.

The fraud networks documented in Trunk's investigations (the Sherwood Lane warehouse cluster, the Handle With Care chameleon reincarnation, the Safe Ship carrier list with 100 revoked carriers, the Leavenworth warehouse connected to Tucker GA) were all detectable from this data. The connections were hiding in plain sight.

The full dataset is queryable in Trunk's NCCDB Complaint Intelligence dashboard at trunk.lorea.ai/dashboard/nccdb. Any company can be searched. Any network can be traversed. The data FMCSA collects but does not cross-reference is now public.