One Wyoming Address, Eight Lost Brokers, One Survivor: Anatomy of a Chameleon Pattern

The setup

There’s a famous mail forwarder in Sheridan, Wyoming, at 30 N Gould Street, Suite R, ZIP 82801. It hosts registered agents for thousands of LLCs — most of them perfectly legitimate businesses that just want a Wyoming filing address for tax or privacy reasons. Nothing wrong with that.

But it’s also the kind of address that shows up over and over when you go looking for chameleon carriers. And here’s a clean example pulled out of the FMCSA data.

The eight brokers

Between 2022 and 2026, eight different broker DOTs registered to that exact same Wyoming address had their authority revoked or withdrawn:

1. ZIM CARGO TRANSPORT LLC
2. DABAAGE 7 LOGISTICS LLC
3. OWL FREIGHT INC
4. YES DISPATCH & LOGISTICS INC
5. REPUBLIC LOGISTIC CENTER LLC
6. FREIGHTSTOP LLC
7. CLEAN GREEN TRANSPORTATION MACHINE LLC
8. RMF LOGISTICS LLC

Eight different brand names. Eight different DOT numbers. Eight different LLCs. One address. All revoked or withdrawn between 2022 and 2026.

There is also one broker at that exact same address whose authority is still active today: LUCKY CHARMS LOGISTICS LLC (USDOT 1985268). One survivor; eight predecessors with the same mailing address.

What the FMCSA database knows and doesn’t know

The FMCSA database knows the address. It knows the dates each entity got its broker authority and the dates each one lost it. It knows none of these LLCs has filed an MCS-150 form (because pure brokers without trucks aren’t required to), which is why we don’t have officer names, phone numbers, or any other identifying details from FMCSA itself.

The database doesn’t know whether one person controls all nine. It doesn’t know whether the LLCs were genuinely independent ventures that coincidentally shared a registered-agent service. It doesn’t know whether any laws were broken.

What the database can say is this: the pattern of eight LLC authorities winking out at one Wyoming registered-agent address with one survivor remaining is a real pattern in the data, and it’s the pattern industry insiders describe when they describe “broker chameleon networks.”

How the pattern works in theory

The classic chameleon broker setup looks like this. An operator forms an LLC in Wyoming (cheap, anonymous, requires only a registered-agent address). They apply for broker authority from FMCSA. They start covering loads — usually through a load board, often with margins built in by quoting one rate to the shipper and paying a lower rate to the carrier.

When the operation accumulates enough disputed payments, complaints to FMCSA, or a freight-broker bond claim, the LLC’s broker authority gets revoked or withdrawn. The operator doesn’t appeal. They form a fresh Wyoming LLC at the same registered-agent address, apply for a new MC number, and continue. The bonds from the previous shell don’t transfer. The shipper relationships that took years to build don’t transfer either, but that doesn’t matter because this kind of operator never had real shipper relationships — they live on the spot market and load-board work.

A pure FMCSA-data investigation can only see the silhouette of this pattern. To prove who’s behind it, you need state-corporate-filings data (who signed the LLC formation documents in Wyoming), or surety-bond filings (who underwrote the bond), or court filings (who got sued).

Why this is a story even without proving fraud

Here’s the part that matters for the industry: the official FMCSA chameleon flag (PRIOR_REVOKE_FLAG) marks zero of the eight lost brokers at this address. Not one. The same field that’s supposed to be FMCSA’s defense against shell-rotation hasn’t flagged any of these LLCs as related entities.

The reason is that PRIOR_REVOKE_FLAG only catches the most direct re-registration patterns — an applicant who openly admits they previously held a revoked DOT. Operators who form fresh LLCs as separate legal entities, with no acknowledged relationship to prior shells, slip through entirely. They are, by design, undetectable by FMCSA’s own tooling.

This pattern is not rare. Running the same cross-check across the full 12,499 lost brokers in our 2022 snapshot, at least 42 of them share a phone number or physical address with a currently-active broker DOT — and that count is a severe undercount, because we don’t have officer names for pure brokers. Each cluster looks like a smaller version of the Lucky Charms example. The Wyoming case is just the most prolific one we can see clearly.

The numbers

• 8 lost-authority brokers at one Wyoming registered-agent address.
• 1 currently-active broker at that same address.
• 0 of the 8 are officially flagged by FMCSA as chameleon-related.
• 12,366 brokers total lost broker authority between 2022 and 2026.
• 42 of them are linked to a currently-active broker by a non-trivial match — and that’s a floor, not a ceiling.

What it would take to push the story further

The investigative version of this piece needs three follow-ups:

1. Wyoming Secretary of State LLC formation records for the nine entities, to determine common organizers, officers, or signing parties.
2. Surety bond filings to identify the bonding companies and any cross-references in claim history.
3. Freight broker bond claim records — if available — to count how many shipper-side disputes followed each of the eight predecessors.

None of those require FMCSA data. All of them are public. A reporter or investigator with two days could close the gaps.

The frame for the industry

Most of the freight industry has heard about chameleon brokers as a concept. Few have seen a concrete example with named entities, dates, and addresses tied to public records. This is that example — anchored on data, with the limitations called out honestly, and with a clear next step for anyone who wants to push past the silhouette into the actual identity behind it.

If even one cluster like this one represents real serial fraud, the cost in unpaid carrier invoices alone is in the millions. There are dozens of similar clusters in the data, and the methodology to find them takes ten minutes once you have the right cross-database join. The reason nobody has done it before is not that the data isn’t available — it’s that nobody outside FMCSA has bothered to parse both the historical scrapes and the current feed at the same time. We did. The receipts are sitting there.

Receipts: USDOT numbers, address matches, and authority-status histories are pulled directly from the FMCSA Carrier table and a 2022 SAFER Web snapshot. All claims about specific named entities are limited to what their FMCSA records publicly show; no allegations of unlawful conduct are made or implied.