Bert and Alejandra Wing paid AMS Transport LLC $12,250 to move their household goods from Honolulu to Florida last summer, the final leg of a military career headed into retirement. Two months after pickup, the truck carrying nearly everything they owned rolled over on an Arizona highway and its roof tore open on impact. Passersby picked through the wreckage on the shoulder for more than a week before anyone told the Wings what had happened. By the time a police officer finally reached them, the family’s photo albums, military honors and a 700-pound piano had already been scattered across State Route 69.
A Cross-Country Move Interrupted in the Desert
The Wings’ belongings left Honolulu on July 10, 2025, picked up by AMS Transport LLC under a promised delivery window of four to eight weeks, according to InvestigateTV. Instead, the truck crashed just after 9:40 a.m. on October 8, 2025, near a gas station in Prescott Valley, off State Route 69. Investigators found the driver had been moving too fast around a curve and braked hard, sending the box truck onto its side. The roof split open and the couple’s possessions spilled onto the dirt shoulder, where they sat exposed to traffic and weather.
Alejandra Wing told InvestigateTV that the crash had wiped out an entire family’s history in a single morning, and that she no longer had the heirlooms she had planned to pass down to her son. Among the losses were anniversary gifts, decades of photographs and awards earned over a military career, the kind of items that carry no real resale value but can’t be replaced at any price.
A Carrier That Was Never Registered
What turns the Wings’ case from a bad accident into a cautionary tale is who was driving the truck. AMS Transport LLC was not registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency that licenses and vets companies moving household goods across state lines. That registration isn’t a formality. It’s the mechanism that lets a family check a company’s safety record, insurance and complaint history before handing over a five-figure deposit.
The FMCSA runs a dedicated consumer-protection site, ProtectYourMove.gov, precisely because unlicensed and fly-by-night movers have become common enough to warrant it. In 2023 alone, the agency’s enforcement sweeps turned up more than 1,000 regulatory violations among household goods movers and brokers, and officials have since expanded the crackdown with more investigators and new partnerships with state attorneys general, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Days of Silence After the Crash
Perhaps the most unsettling detail is the gap between the wreck and the phone call. Days passed before an officer, working from paperwork recovered at the scene, tracked the Wings down to tell them their belongings were strewn across an Arizona roadside. In that window, items were picked over by people who stopped at the crash site, according to Gray Media affiliate reporting on the crash. A family that had spent a career moving on short notice for the military was left waiting to find out what, if anything, of their old life had survived.
Arizona’s top consumer watchdog, Attorney General Kris Mayes, has used cases like this one to press a simple point: households should vet a moving company the same way they’d vet a contractor, checking Better Business Bureau records and searching for complaints before ever signing a contract or handing over a deposit.
Not an Isolated Case
The Wings’ experience lines up with a pattern federal regulators have been tracking for years. Household goods moving fraud, where a company underbids a job, collects a deposit, then holds belongings hostage for more money or simply vanishes, has become common enough that the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General maintains a standing investigations unit for it. Military families are frequent targets of that pattern, since permanent-change-of-station orders often come with tight deadlines that leave little time to shop around for a carrier or double-check its paperwork.
For the Wings, recovering from the crash has meant filing claims and trying to put a value on things that were never bought to be sold. A 700-pound piano can be replaced with money. Decades of photographs and a lifetime of military honors generally cannot. That distinction is part of why regulators keep pushing the same basic advice: confirm a mover’s FMCSA number, read its complaint history, and get everything in writing before a truck ever pulls out of the driveway. For a family that had already navigated years of military relocations without incident, the crash in Prescott Valley was a reminder that the final move of a career can go wrong in ways no amount of experience can prevent.
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