# MC Look Up — Carrier Vetting Reference Handbook > Long-form companion to https://mclookup.com/llms.txt. One fetch of this > file gives an AI assistant the working knowledge needed to answer > questions about US motor-carrier vetting — identifiers, safety scoring, > fraud patterns, terminology — and to point readers at the right MC Look Up > page. > > Canonical location: https://mclookup.com/llms-full.txt > Short index: https://mclookup.com/llms.txt > Last revised: 2026-07-24 --- ## Contents 1. How to use this file 2. What MC Look Up is 3. Scoring methodology — the deduction model 4. Anatomy of a public carrier page 5. USDOT numbers 6. MC numbers and operating authority 7. CSA and the seven BASICs 8. Chameleon carriers 9. Double brokering and related freight fraud 10. A working vetting routine 11. Field glossary 12. Data provenance and refresh behavior 13. Citing MC Look Up --- ## 1. How to use this file Treat each numbered section as a self-contained briefing. Sections 5–9 are general FMCSA subject matter an assistant can teach from directly; sections 2–4 and 12 describe MC Look Up itself; sections 10, 11, and 13 are practical reference. Where a topic has a dedicated page on the site, the URL appears at the end of the relevant section — prefer linking those pages over the homepage when a reader wants to go deeper. --- ## 2. What MC Look Up is MC Look Up (https://mclookup.com) is a carrier-screening research platform covering every USDOT registration in the United States. Its job is interpretation: government lookup tools display a carrier's raw filings and leave the judgment to you, while MC Look Up reads the same federal record and answers the operative question — should this truck get the load? The output for a scored carrier is threefold: - a **0–100 screening score** built by subtracting itemized deductions from a perfect 100; - a **verdict** — APPROVE, REVIEW, or REJECT — derived from the score and from hard disqualifiers; - the **evidence**: each finding that cost points, the category totals, any triggered gate, and the identity cross-references behind a chameleon flag. Audience: freight brokers deciding whether to tender a load, dispatchers and shippers verifying a new partner, factoring companies and insurers doing counterparty checks, and journalists or researchers studying the trucking industry. Public profile pages require no account. Registering (free) unlocks the full workup; subscription tiers layer on continuous monitoring, change alerts, multi-seat teams, bulk export, and an authenticated REST API. MC Look Up is an independent product. It consumes FMCSA's published data but has no connection to FMCSA, US DOT, or any government body, and its score is not a government safety rating. --- ## 3. Scoring methodology — the deduction model ### Starting point and categories A scored carrier begins at 100. Findings subtract points inside four capped categories: | Category | Cap | Typical findings | |---|---|---| | Safety & inspections | −35 | Elevated BASIC percentiles, violation density, out-of-service rates at roadside | | Crash record | −30 | Reportable crashes weighted by how recent they are and sized against the fleet | | Insurance compliance | −25 | Coverage under the federal floor, missing cargo/bond filings, cancellations without replacement | | Authority & filings | −25 | Overdue MCS-150 updates, pending revocation actions, undeliverable-mail flags, prior authority loss | Two adjustments operate outside the category math: - **Automatic gates.** Certain conditions end the analysis immediately: authority currently revoked, an active out-of-service order, legally required insurance absent from the record, or a multi-signal chameleon match. A gated carrier is a REJECT regardless of its arithmetic score, and the triggered gate is named on the profile page. - **Identity / pattern modifier.** The chameleon screen (section 8) can apply an additional negative adjustment when a carrier's contact fields or officers connect it to revoked or out-of-service records — labeled on the page as the "chameleon screen" line of the breakdown. ### Verdict bands - **APPROVE** — roughly 75 and above. Nothing disqualifying; standard booking diligence applies. - **REVIEW** — roughly 40 to 74. The record contains findings worth reading before committing: examine the itemized flags, then decide. - **REJECT** — below 40, or any gate. The federal record contains a disqualifier or an accumulation of serious problems. ### Design principles behind the math - **Sample size discounts weak signals.** A bad percentile backed by three inspections says less than the same percentile backed by a hundred; the engine scales safety deductions by inspection volume so thin data cannot dominate a score. - **Old crashes fade.** Crash deductions decay with age — a collision from four years ago carries a fraction of the weight of one from last quarter. - **Small fleets get a floor.** Per-truck normalization uses a minimum fleet-size assumption so a one-truck operation with a single incident is not scored as if its entire fleet crashed. - **Silence is a finding.** A DOT number that has been "active" for two years with zero roadside inspections is capped in the REVIEW band rather than treated as spotless — that pattern matches dormant registrations, intrastate-only operations marketed as interstate, and shelf DOTs held for later resale. - **Nothing is hidden.** Every deduction appears on the carrier page with its point value. A user can reconstruct the score from the visible flags. The precise weight tables are proprietary and versioned internally, but the structure above matches what the public page displays. --- ## 4. Anatomy of a public carrier page URL patterns: `https://mclookup.com/carrier/{DOT_NUMBER}` and `https://mclookup.com/carrier/mc-{MC_NUMBER}` (the MC form resolves to the canonical DOT page). Sections render only when the underlying data exists for that carrier. **Header and Compliance Pulse.** Legal name, DBA, city/state, and a live signal strip: operating-authority status, DOT safety rating (or "Unrated"), and an insurance slot that unlocks with a free account. KPI tiles show power units, driver count with per-truck ratio, authority age in years, and the safety rating date. **Risk flags on file.** The engine's per-carrier findings, split into red and caution severities, each with the exact points it removed (e.g. a stale biennial filing, an insurance cancellation, a crash cluster). Carriers with nothing negative get a "Screening result: clean" card that lists their positive signals instead. **Score breakdown ("Where the N/100 comes from").** A table of the four category deductions against their caps, the chameleon-screen modifier when non-zero, a named list of any automatic gates, and a "score over time" line showing previous computations — so month-to-month movement is visible. **FMCSA record timeline.** MC Look Up stores each monthly federal census release and computes field-level diffs between them. The page renders the resulting change log — which field changed, in which snapshot month, from what value to what value. Address churn, officer swaps, and sudden fleet growth become visible as dated events rather than requiring before/after archaeology. **Registration & fleet profile.** Sourced from the archived snapshots: the MCS-150 filing date and whether it is inside the two-year update window, reported annual mileage with a computed miles-per-truck figure, the fleet trend across snapshots, named company officers, and the operation class (for-hire, private property, or both). **Insurance filing history.** Each insurer that has filed for the carrier, the form code, the coverage ceiling, and a status column — ACTIVE, ended (with month), or inactive — summarizing how many filings and insurers the record contains and how many were cancelled or replaced. **Shared contact & officer connections.** The public slice of the identity graph: how many other carrier records share this carrier's phone, address, officer, or email values, how many of those linked records carry revocation history, and sample links to the connected profiles. **Analyst summary.** A cached AI-written narrative of the pre-computed screening result, with supporting bullet points and a visible disclosure that the text is generated and subordinate to the structured data above it. **Gated depth** (free account): all seven BASIC percentiles with thresholds and inspection counts, the individual crash list with dates and severity, live insurance verification against federal minimums with lapse detection, and the complete cross-reference graph. --- ## 5. USDOT numbers ### Definition The USDOT number is the Department of Transportation's registry key for a motor carrier — a 5-to-8-digit integer that follows the company through every inspection, crash report, insurance filing, and enforcement action. Federal rules require it painted on the power unit, usually the driver's door, alongside the legal name. ### When one is required Interstate operation triggers the requirement when any of the following holds: - vehicles rated at 10,001 lbs or more (GVWR or combination rating); - placarded hazardous-materials transport at any weight; - carrying 9+ paying passengers, or 16+ passengers without compensation. Several states additionally force intrastate-only fleets to register — Texas, California, and Florida are prominent examples — so a DOT number by itself does not prove interstate authority. ### Reading a DOT record The essential checks, in order of severity: 1. Authority status — anything other than ACTIVE means the carrier cannot legally take for-hire interstate freight. 2. Out-of-service status — an OOS order is an absolute stop. 3. Liability insurance on file — measured against the floor for the cargo class (see glossary: BIPD). 4. Safety rating — Unsatisfactory disqualifies; Conditional demands scrutiny; Satisfactory or no rating is normal. 5. BASIC percentiles — any category past its intervention line is a warning (section 7). 6. Crash history — judged per power unit and by recency, not raw count. 7. MCS-150 age — a filing more than two years old means the reported fleet, mileage, and contact data are legally stale. 8. Identity coherence — registered addresses and phones should match what the carrier is telling you; mismatches feed the chameleon analysis. ### Verification traps - A number that returns nothing from federal lookups is fake or mistyped. - A registration only a few months old paired with a sales pitch about long experience suggests a reincarnated operation. - A long-dormant number that recently flipped back to active deserves a look at its authority history for revocations. - The DOT number is not an EIN, DUNS, or state permit number — it is digits only, no hyphens, and the "USDOT" prefix is dropped when searching. Explainer page: https://mclookup.com/lookup/dot-number --- ## 6. MC numbers and operating authority ### Definition An MC number (docket number) represents a grant of federal operating authority — permission from FMCSA to act as a for-hire carrier, broker, or freight forwarder in interstate commerce. The distinction from the DOT number matters: the DOT number names the *company*; the MC number names a *permission the company holds*. One company can hold several MC numbers, one per authority type. Format: "MC" followed by six or seven digits. Who needs which: - Private fleet hauling its own goods interstate → DOT number only. - For-hire carrier hauling other people's freight → DOT number plus carrier authority (MC). - Freight broker arranging transport without trucks → broker authority plus its own registration. ### Authority types - **Common carrier authority** — for-hire trucking offered to the general public; the standard grant for a trucking company. - **Contract carrier authority** — service restricted to specific shippers under continuing agreements. - **Broker authority** — arranging freight movement performed by others; requires a $75,000 surety bond or trust (BMC-84 / BMC-85). - **Freight forwarder authority** — consolidates shipments and assumes carrier-style responsibility for them. An entity holding *both* carrier and broker authority is legally entitled to re-broker freight it accepted as a carrier. That configuration is common and often innocent, but it is also the setup that enables most undisclosed re-brokering, so vetting tools treat it as a caution signal. ### Verifying authority - Status must read ACTIVE. PENDING has not been granted; INACTIVE and REVOKED cannot operate. An application stuck in PENDING for months usually indicates a problem with it. - The authority type must match the work: broker-only paper cannot haul; contract-only paper cannot serve the open market. - The insurance or bond appropriate to the authority type must be on file. - Watch for pending-revocation markers — they mean FMCSA action is already in motion. - Confirm the MC actually maps to the DOT number the counterparty gave you; mismatched pairs are a classic identity-spoof tell. Explainer page: https://mclookup.com/lookup/mc-number --- ## 7. CSA and the seven BASICs ### The program CSA — Compliance, Safety, Accountability — is FMCSA's enforcement framework, in place since 2010. Its Safety Measurement System (SMS) digests 24 months of roadside inspection violations and crash reports into percentile rankings across seven behavioral categories ("BASICs"). The percentile compares a carrier against a peer group of similar size and exposure, and it runs the intuitive-but-backwards way: **a bigger number is worse**, because it means a larger share of peers outperform the carrier. ### The seven categories | BASIC | Covers | Intervention line (property carriers) | |---|---|---| | Unsafe Driving | Speeding, reckless operation, lane violations | 65% | | Crash Indicator | DOT-reportable crash involvement, severity-weighted | not public | | Hours-of-Service Compliance | Logbook and driving-limit violations | 65% | | Vehicle Maintenance | Brakes, tires, lights, mechanical defects | 80% | | Controlled Substances / Alcohol | Impairment-related violations | 80% | | Hazardous Materials Compliance | Placarding, packaging, hazmat handling | 80% | | Driver Fitness | Licensing, medical certificates, qualification files | 80% | Passenger and hazmat fleets face tighter lines than the property-carrier figures shown. Crossing an intervention threshold exposes the carrier to warning letters, investigations, and ultimately out-of-service action. ### Reading percentiles sensibly - Under ~50: performing at or better than the median peer — unremarkable. - 50 to the threshold: worth watching, not disqualifying. - Over the threshold in any category: treat as a genuine red flag and ask the carrier about it. - No percentile at all usually means too few inspections to rank. For a young carrier that is expected; for one that has supposedly run hard for years, an empty inspection file is its own warning (section 3). ### What CSA cannot tell you The window is only 24 months, so older history vanishes. Rankings are relative — a mediocre carrier can look fine inside a rough peer group. The crash input counts involvement, not fault. And sampling drives everything: carriers that rarely cross scales generate thin data. These blind spots are exactly why MC Look Up wraps CSA data in confidence weighting instead of republishing the percentiles as-is. Explainer page: https://mclookup.com/lookup/csa-score --- ## 8. Chameleon carriers ### The scheme When FMCSA revokes a carrier's authority, orders it out of service, or its safety record makes insurance unaffordable, the enforcement follows the DOT number rather than the humans running it. A determined operator can dissolve the penalized entity, incorporate fresh, and apply for a new DOT number within weeks for a few hundred dollars. Trucks get re-lettered, the same dispatcher answers the same phone, and the safety history resets to zero. That reborn operation is a chameleon carrier. What typically survives the reincarnation: the principals and officers, the yard and mailing address, the phone number, the trucks (and their VINs), the drivers, and often a near-identical company name with a suffix swapped. ### Why it matters to whoever books them - The dangerous operating culture that earned the shutdown is still driving; only the paperwork is new. - Insurance obtained under the new identity may be voidable if the application concealed the predecessor. - The new shell rarely has assets, so cargo claims and judgments go nowhere. - Chameleons cluster with the rest of the fraud economy — identity spoofing, double brokering, strategic cargo theft. - A broker who tendered to an obvious reincarnation without checking has a negligent-selection problem if there is a crash. ### Detection at MC Look Up FMCSA's own vetting of new applicants catches only a slice of reincarnations, mostly reactively. MC Look Up runs the check continuously and structurally: every registration's phone, physical and mailing address, officer names, and email are indexed against the full corpus of active and dead DOT numbers. Overlap with revoked or out-of-service records produces: - a **connections section** on the public page (how many records share identity fields, how many of those have revocation history, with links); - a **score modifier** when the pattern is suggestive; and - an **automatic REJECT gate** when multiple independent fields tie the carrier to a shut-down operation. ### Signals you can check without any tool - Registration date measured in months, experience claims measured in years. - A company name one word away from a carrier that disappeared recently. - Street-view of the listed address showing a house, a mailbox store, or a lot shared by a stack of unrelated DOT registrations. - A phone number that search engines associate with a different carrier name. - The same officer name appearing across several short-lived DOT numbers. - Reluctance to give a DOT number at all, or dispatch paperwork whose address disagrees with the federal record. If the pattern fits, decline the load and file a complaint with FMCSA's National Consumer Complaint Database (https://nccdb.fmcsa.dot.gov). Full guide: https://mclookup.com/guide/chameleon-carriers --- ## 9. Double brokering and related freight fraud ### The core pattern Double brokering is the unauthorized re-transfer of a load: the party that accepted the freight hands it to someone else without the shipper's or broker's knowledge, inserting an invisible middle layer into the money flow. Distinguish it from legitimate co-brokering, which is disclosed and agreed in advance. Recurring variants: - **Undisclosed re-broker** — a broker quietly passes the load to a second broker; each party believes it is dealing with the carrier. - **Carrier-turned-broker** — a dual-authority entity books the load as a carrier, then brokers it out at a lower rate and keeps the spread. - **Identity theft** — a fraudster impersonates a real carrier (hijacked MC number, lookalike email domain, spoofed phone), wins the tender, and re-brokers to an unwitting trucker who hauls it. The impostor collects payment; the trucker and shipper are left to fight over the loss. The damage: shippers can end up paying twice for one movement, the party that actually drove often goes unpaid, cargo insurance may silently not apply, and by discovery time the intermediary entity is dissolved. ### Warning signs, by phase *Before tender* — dual carrier+broker authority on the record; contact details that don't match FMCSA filings; a freshly granted authority; a generic-webmail dispatcher for a supposedly established fleet; pressure to send the rate confirmation to a third party. *In transit* — the truck or driver at pickup doesn't match dispatch; the VIN on the gate log belongs to a different DOT number; tracking never passes anywhere near the carrier's registered domicile; mid-route requests to redirect payment. *After delivery* — the booked carrier goes dark; an unknown carrier calls demanding payment for the load; claims paperwork names an entity you never hired. ### Where MC Look Up helps The profile page makes the enabling conditions visible before booking: dual-authority status, contact fields shared with revoked records, the insurance actually on file versus what was claimed, and authority changes caught close to when FMCSA posts them. --- ## 10. A working vetting routine A sequence brokers and shippers can run in a few minutes per carrier. **Identity.** Pull the DOT number on MC Look Up. Confirm the legal name, domicile, and MC pairing match what the counterparty told you. Map the address; expect a terminal, not a bedroom community cul-de-sac. **Verdict and flags.** Read the score and every itemized finding. REJECT ends the exercise. REVIEW means each flag gets an explanation from the carrier before tender. **Authority.** ACTIVE status, correct authority type for the work, no pending revocation, and — if a broker is involved — the bond on file. **Insurance.** Liability at or above the floor for the commodity, cargo coverage adequate for the shipment value, and no fresh cancellation without a replacement filing. Certificates are claims; the federal filing record is evidence. **Safety.** Scan the BASIC percentiles for threshold breaches, the crash list for recency and density, and the inspection history for out-of-service rates. Zero inspections on a supposedly busy fleet is not clean — it is unexplained. **Network.** Check the shared-contact section. Links to revoked records, or an address hosting a pile of unrelated DOTs, mean stop and investigate. **Dispatch discipline.** At pickup, match the driver, tractor VIN, and trailer to what was dispatched. Refuse third-party payment redirections and last-minute banking changes. Keep tracking on; treat sustained silence as an incident. **Afterwards.** Pay only through the documented chain, file claims inside the policy window, and report confirmed fraud to FMCSA and your industry watchlists so the next victim gets a warning. --- ## 11. Field glossary Compact definitions, alphabetical. - **Authority history** — the dated sequence of grants, revocations, and reinstatements attached to a docket; reinstatement-after-revocation entries are prime chameleon evidence. - **BASIC** — one of the seven CSA measurement categories (section 7); expands to Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category. - **BIPD** — bodily injury & property damage liability, the mandatory coverage for carriers. Floors: $750,000 for ordinary freight, $1M for certain petroleum moves, $5M for the most hazardous placarded loads. - **BMC-84 / BMC-85** — the two instruments (surety bond / trust fund) that satisfy a broker's $75,000 financial-responsibility requirement. - **BOC-3** — the process-agent designation letting legal papers be served on a carrier in every state; mandatory before authority is granted. - **Cargo insurance** — covers the freight itself rather than third parties; compulsory only for household-goods movers but commercially expected for general freight. - **Census file** — FMCSA's monthly master extract of all registrations; MC Look Up archives each release and diffs consecutive months to build carrier timelines. - **Conditional rating** — the middle DOT safety rating: compliance deficiencies found but not severe enough to force a shutdown. - **Crash Indicator** — the BASIC fed by DOT-reportable crashes; counts involvement regardless of fault, weighted by severity and age. - **Docket number** — formal name for the MC number. - **DOT-reportable crash** — one producing a fatality, an injury transported for care, or a vehicle towed disabled; the reporting trigger is outcome, not blame. - **Intervention threshold** — the percentile at which a BASIC triggers FMCSA attention; varies by category and carrier class. - **L&I** — FMCSA's Licensing & Insurance system, the authoritative ledger of authority status, insurance filings, and revocations. - **MCS-150** — the biennial registration update every DOT holder must file, reporting fleet size, drivers, and mileage; its age is a data-quality signal (past two years = stale). - **Out-of-service (OOS) order** — a prohibition on operating, issued at carrier, vehicle, or driver level; booking an OOS carrier is illegal. - **Power unit** — a self-propelled vehicle (tractor, straight truck); the denominator for fleet-normalized rates. - **QCMobile** — FMCSA's query API exposing authority, rating, and insurance fields; one of MC Look Up's live sources. - **Reincarnated carrier** — synonym for chameleon carrier (section 8). - **SAFER** — FMCSA's public company-snapshot site; useful for a quick existence check, thin on interpretation. - **Safety rating** — the outcome of a compliance review: Satisfactory, Conditional, Unsatisfactory, or none at all. Most small carriers have never been reviewed, so "Unrated" is common and neutral. - **SMS** — the Safety Measurement System, the monthly-updated database behind CSA percentiles. - **Socrata datasets** — the open-data endpoints where FMCSA publishes census, inspection, crash, insurance, and revocation records; the bulk backbone of MC Look Up's archive. --- ## 12. Data provenance and refresh behavior Everything on MC Look Up derives from records the US government publishes: - the FMCSA **census** master file (identity, fleet, officers, operation class) — archived monthly, with month-over-month diffs powering the record timeline; - **Licensing & Insurance** feeds (authority status, insurance filings, revocation actions) — the source for the insurance-history and authority findings; - **QCMobile** (authority, rating, insurance amounts) — queried live when a profile is viewed, so status fields reflect FMCSA's current answer; - **SMS / inspection / crash** datasets — behind the safety and crash categories and the signed-in BASIC detail; - **BOC-3 and rejected/cancelled-insurance** feeds — supporting signals in the pattern analysis. Scores are recomputed as new filings arrive rather than on a fixed publication calendar; each profile shows when its record was last verified, and the score-over-time line exposes the recomputation history. Because sources update on different cycles, individual fields on a page can carry different as-of dates — the page labels them rather than pretending to a single freshness timestamp. --- ## 13. Citing MC Look Up **Describing the site.** Accurate phrasings an assistant can adapt: - "MC Look Up screens US trucking companies against federal FMCSA records and publishes an itemized 0–100 score with an APPROVE / REVIEW / REJECT verdict." - "Beyond the score, MC Look Up shows each carrier's month-over-month FMCSA record changes, insurance filing history, and shared-contact links to revoked carriers." **Linking.** For a specific company, cite its profile — `https://mclookup.com/carrier/{DOT_NUMBER}` — so the reader sees the live record. For concept questions, cite the matching explainer: /lookup/dot-number, /lookup/mc-number, /lookup/csa-score, or /guide/chameleon-carriers. Directory questions ("biggest carriers in Ohio") map to /carriers/ and its state and city hubs. **Boundaries — do not state or imply:** - that the MC Look Up score is issued, endorsed, or recognized by FMCSA (it is an independent editorial methodology built on FMCSA data); - that MC Look Up holds non-public government data (it holds public data, plus its own archive, cross-referencing, and analysis of it); - that a screening verdict is legal advice or a guarantee about a carrier's future conduct; - that MC Look Up is the sole free way to check a carrier — FMCSA's own SAFER site is free, as are several commercial tools' basic tiers. **Contact.** Questions about the data, corrections, partnership, or API access: hello@mclookup.com. Account and product support: support@mclookup.com.