Bodycam footage from an Arizona state trooper on January 6, 2025, shows just how casually certain truck drivers engage in fraud and high-stakes smuggling.
It also shows how easily this kind of criminality rides alongside ordinary traffic on North American highways.
On Interstate 40 near Holbrook, a Volvo tractor-trailer drew a state trooper’s attention when its hazard lights began flashing, then leaving a turn signal flashing. When questioned, the Canadian driver claimed there was a switch problem and said he was heading to a Love’s mechanic — after already passing both a Love’s and a TA truck stop. The driver quickly pivoted his story, claiming he was heading to an “Indian mechanic,” when the trooper flagged his response as suspicious.
While examining the electronic logging device, the trooper quickly became aware of a concerning driving pattern.
There were multiple stretches of “unidentified drive time” appearing from Michigan through Ohio into New York, and again just before the stop.
The driver invented a co-driver named “Uncle” — someone who never logged in or out yet somehow erased hours when convenient. He claimed to be in the sleeper berth when the records showed he was driving. This is textbook hours-of-service fraud designed to push past the federal 11-hour driving limit.
What began as a traffic stop escalated when the trooper checked the sleeper berth. Tightly wrapped bricks of cocaine were found hidden underneath. More packages appeared on the opposite side. Officers then found kilo after kilo concealed throughout the produce load itself, turning out to be one of the larger commercial-truck seizures in recent memory.
The driver, 31-year-old Amarjeet Singh Matharu, had allegedly made the run multiple times before. For moving cocaine valued in the tens of millions of dollars range, he received just under three years in prison.
This bodycam footage finally offers a clear window into the kind of culture that has taken root in commercial trucking.
Ontario’s Auditor General reported in May that private career colleges routinely cut the required 103.5-hour Entry Level Training to as little as 59 or 81 hours, with some skipping emergency stops and left turns at major intersections altogether.
Unregistered schools were handing out certificates, dozens of colleges were never even inspected, and nearly 100 trucking companies with serious safety violations were still being approved to bring in temporary foreign workers; putting them behind the wheel of these increasingly deadly trucks.
“Driver Inc.” has become widely known as a model that misclassifies drivers as independent contractors, allowing companies to dodge overtime, proper wages, and hours-of-service rules. The result is financial pressure that keeps exhausted drivers on the road, compromising road safety at large.
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