We offered 27 tower-crew recruiters a worker with no Social Security number, no work authorization, and a one-person LLC. Twenty-three said yes.
Eighty-five percent of the recruiters tested. The primes contract it. The tower owners host it. The carriers sit on top.
A small group of investigators — all of us industry participants — ran a controlled test. A Russian-speaking team member direct-messaged twenty-seven named recruiters across the Telegram channels this workforce uses for hiring. His cover story was the same every time: lots of experience, no Social Security number, no work authorization, only an LLC — a shell company anyone can register in any state for the cost of a filing fee. Twenty-three of the twenty-seven accepted him on that basis. Eighty-five percent. The acceptances came from named operators at named companies, in their own writing, archived.
That result is the surface of a labor model that has become standard practice in U.S. wireless tower construction. Workers without Social Security numbers, without work authorization, and without W-2s climb live cell towers under one-person LLCs whose tax identifiers stand in for any individual identity claim — no I-9 on file, no payroll taxes withheld, no individual worker on record. This site documents ninety-three companies, drawn from roughly thirty thousand messages across three Russian-language Telegram channels and twenty-nine direct-message threads.
The pattern is upstream of the documented subcontractors. Ericsson, Amentum, MasTec, and Nokia run the prime contracts. American Tower, SBA, Crown Castle, Betacom, Centerline, and Infra Services run their own carrier programs hiring the same documented crews. The investigation is not a call to stop construction — see the Notice to Carriers in the Open Letter.
At $13,000 per site, the work cannot be performed lawfully.
Verbatim — m0293
уебали цену на 13К я им сказал уже меньше 20К не-а
they slashed the price to $13K, I told them less than $20K no way
A first-tier TSC subcontractor describes TSC unilaterally cutting per-site rates from $20,000 to $13,000. The sub refused. TSC then approached Edgar, who also refused at $21,000. The work continued at $13,000 — done by 1099 invoices to one-person LLCs.
View the full finding with context →A Notice to Carriers, Primes, and Tower Owners
This investigation is not a call to stop construction. The right response is targeted enforcement, not blanket shutdowns. Continue construction through verified, compliant contractors while reviewing subcontractor chains, crew documentation, payroll, insurance, certifications, and repeated crew movement between company names.
Do not stop the work. Clean the supply chain. Protect the compliant contractors. Remove the companies that are exploiting workers and undercutting the industry.