SAN ANTONIO – In the midst of an industry meeting of freight brokers who talked about freight fraud at every opportunity, Kendra Tucker made an interesting observation: She knows of no fraud perpetrators who ever found themselves in handcuffs.
“What I get a lot of are anecdotes from our customers about how cargo was stolen, the lengths to which people are going to steal it,” Tucker, the CEO of Truckstop, said in an interview at the company’s booth on the exhibition floor of the Capital Ideas Conference of the Transportation Intermediaries Association. “What you don’t hear are stories about how this was punished.”
And to make that happen, Tucker said, there will need to be a concerted effort on the part of the industry across companies and associations.
“I think it has to do with the issue not rising to the level of enough people as a group being hurt for the right dollar amount to get the FBI to really look at it and try to help us,” she added.
Truckstop, known primarily for its freight-matching loadboard, has made being out in front of the fraud issue one of the most industry-facing strategies the company has undertaken. But Tucker suggested the company can’t do it alone.
The TIA itself talks about the issue regularly, and President Chris Burroughs, who rose to the top position last year, made it the core subject in his first address to the organization’s biggest conference.
Working together is needed
But Tucker said the fight against fraud needs to be more collaborative. “I was talking with TIA about this, and there really is an opportunity for brokers, carriers and shippers, who are all impacted by this, to come together with people like us and other key players in the industry, to decide how we want to approach it within the industry, so that we can have a cohesive approach to it,” she said.
Such a step would involve bringing in the Department of Transportation and other government agencies to “put some teeth on this.”
And that gets back to how she opened the conversation: “The reason fraud continues is because it isn’t being prosecuted.”
In conjunction with the TIA meeting, Truckstop released a report of a recent survey it did on the top issues facing the industry. According to the company, the top issue identified by brokers was “finding a carrier you can trust.”
Fraud is not new. But there is a consensus in the industry that it has exploded in recent years.
Tucker, who became CEO in April 2022 but who joined Truckstop in August 2020, said her discussions with Truckstop customers have been consistent in saying that the fraud of the past few years most definitely is more pervasive than it was several years ago.
But she said there is a parallel: what the industry went through during the great recession. “That seems to track right where we’re in, where we’ve been in a down cycle or down market that you see fraud really ticking up,” Tucker said.
Chasing the bad guys and their technology
The difference this time from 2008 and 2009 is technology, she said.
Two years ago at the TIA meeting, the buzzword was double brokering. It’s a practice that can be legitimate if it is simply legal rebrokering: A broker assigns a load to a carrier who then reassigns it to another. There are instances in which that is acceptable under the terms of a contract. But beyond those situations, it can involve theft, late deliveries and service that violates the terms of a broker’s agreement with a shipper, and a small loss on the cargo is a much lesser problem than cleaning up the mess afterward.
But at the San Antonio TIA meeting, the conversation was about fraud in general.
Tucker said the latest developments cover a wide range of categories: various digital activity, phishing emails, “the actual stealing of freight at the docks and in the warehouses,” and the trafficking in legitimate motor carrier numbers bought from an owner willing to part with it for several thousand dollars.
“I think there have been so many technological advances since the great recession that fraud has been able to proliferate differently than it might have,” she said.
Technology tools are available to the industry as well, Tucker said, “but you have to think one step ahead of the fraudsters because for the nefarious actors, as soon as we find ways to prevent a certain type of fraud that’s happening, new ways pop up.”
Buying a legitimate MC
The scam of fraudsters purchasing legitimate motor carrier authorities, usually from an unwitting seller, has become a big problem, Tucker said.
As Tucker described it, the legitimate MC might have a clean record attached to it. But then if the MC number is not being actively used, the owner might stumble upon a Facebook page or other social media channel set up specifically for a scam artist to buy an MC.
“The pages say, ‘We’ll buy your MC for $15,000 or even $50,000,’” Tucker said. “It is very active.”
She noted that while there are more sophisticated tools that fraudsters can use rather than paying an unwitting seller for an MC, the purchase of a legitimate MC to pursue illegitimate ends relies on the seller being “not educated enough and protective enough of their personal information.”
When the scam hits, she said, the illegitimate activity will be tied to that MC number, with potentially long-lasting consequences for the person who sold it. “Why would you sell your identity for any amount of money?” Tucker said.
But here’s the irony: For all the focus on fraud, the survey also found that it had declined in the past year. Tucker said Truckstop’s own customers reported a 57% reduction in fraud between last year and this year.
“I’m not saying that fraud has gone away,” she said. “I’m saying that for a good chunk of our customers, it is not at the peak that it was in ’24 so that’s very good.”
Truckstop’s own data is that last year, it blocked almost 13,000 entities that were trying to get on to the Truckstop load board but flunked the company’s identity verification.
That verification includes needing to present a driver’s license as a basic first-step test. Beyond that, Tucker said, there is a multifactor authentication that includes a review by the company’s “security and assurance team.” Over recent years, Tucker said, that team has blocked more than 70,000 entities trying to get on to the loadboard as a broker, carrier or shipper from making it on to Truckstop’s platform.
“We’ve got an actual team of humans; some of our highest tenured staff at Truckstop work on that team,” Tucker said.
That enables them to address head-on the survey’s biggest concern about a broker being able to trust the carrier that it hired. “Our customers tell us consistently that they’ve never gotten a fraudulent carrier from us,” Tucker said. “So nothing is 100% sure, of course, but very consistently, we get really positive feedback from our customers about how much they trust us.”
More articles by John Kingston
Breaking from the FreightTech AI pack: Companies make their case at TIA meeting
New Mack long-haul truck makes grand entrance in bid for market share
ATBS says independent drivers earned a little more in ’24 but drove more as well
