Motor carriers, brokers and other transportation businesses should review registration emails carefully after federal regulators identified four fraudulent websites impersonating the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s new Motus system.
Four Fake Websites Identified, and How to Spot the Real One
FMCSA says customers have received messages with the subject line “Notice of Required Off-Cycle Update- Motus email.” The messages direct recipients to a “New MOTUS Portal” and claim their profiles require immediate attention.
The agency says the only legitimate Motus address is motus.dot.gov.
The four fake addresses identified in its warning are dot.motusdatasboard.com, dot.motusdatadesk.com, dot.motuswebdeck.com and dot.motusfunction.com.
None of the sites use a .gov domain. The first also misspells “dashboard” as “datasboard,” while the message’s use of “MOTUS” in all capital letters is another warning sign.
FMCSA says Motus is a name, not an acronym.
Why the Timing Makes This Scam More Dangerous
The campaign is especially timely because carriers are still adapting to the registration system the FMCSA launched on May 19. The transition has produced access and processing problems, and the agency recently extended a temporary pause on enforcement of overdue biennial updates and related USDOT-number inactivations.
An email demanding an immediate off-cycle update should therefore be checked against current agency guidance rather than followed automatically.
How Fleet Managers Should Protect Their Accounts
Fleet managers should tell employees not to use an email link to reach Motus. A safer procedure is to type motus.dot.gov directly into a browser or use a saved company bookmark verified by compliance or information-technology personnel.
Companies also should determine who is authorized to manage the federal registration account. Dispatchers, accounting employees and executives may receive convincing messages even though they are not responsible for making changes. A written escalation procedure can keep one urgent email from becoming an account compromise.
FMCSA advises users to hover over links to reveal their actual destinations and to avoid links they cannot verify. Suspicious communications can be reported to the Federal Trade Commission, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, local police or a state attorney general.
What To Do If You’ve Already Clicked
A carrier that clicked one of the links should not assume that closing the webpage ended the exposure.
The company should notify its technology and compliance personnel, change affected credentials through the legitimate system, review account activity and preserve the message and technical information for investigators. Financial institutions should be contacted promptly if payment information was entered.
The agency has not disclosed how many companies received the messages or whether the campaign has caused confirmed financial losses, registration changes or account takeovers.
That distinction matters. The websites are confirmed impostors, but their operators’ identities and the full scope of the campaign have not been established publicly.
The new alert adds to a longer list of scams targeting federal carrier records, including fake safety-audit requests, bogus compliance notices and websites imitating FMCSA’s SAFER database. The common tactic is urgency: The recipient is told that registration, authority or another business-critical record is at risk unless action is taken immediately.
The correct response is to pause, verify the domain and reach FMCSA independently.
