Tools for carrier vetting are shifting from checking compliance to continuous behavior monitoring. (Krista Bussey/Transport Topics)
Key Takeaways
Criminals increasingly impersonate legitimate carriers through phishing, compromised email accounts, typo-squatted domains and AI-generated communications.
Traditional onboarding checks cannot confirm whether the person booking a specific load is legitimate, creating a gap that enables cargo diversion.
Businesses are combining continuous identity verification, behavior monitoring, telematics, alerts and human review to strengthen security while limiting false positives.
Strategic Cargo Theft Escalates
In a widely publicized example of the growing threat of strategic cargo theft, a $400,000 shipment of lobster meat bound for Costco stores was stolen late last year by criminals impersonating a legitimate motor carrier.
Such high-value cargo thefts and acts of identity fraud are increasing in number and sophistication, putting pressure on freight brokers and other industry players to strengthen their carrier vetting practices.
To protect their freight, transportation businesses are implementing continuous verification, monitoring and layered security approaches rather than traditional onboarding checks alone.
“The key is you’ve got to follow the process every single time,” said Chris Burroughs, president and CEO of the Transportation Intermediaries Association.
He noted the rise of technology companies offering carrier vetting support and pointed out that they, too, can vary in their approaches, using different algorithms and data points.
The vetting platforms verify different kinds of information, such as banking details, motor carrier numbers and commercial driver licenses, said Keith Lewis, vice president of operations for Verisk CargoNet.
“Even if you put all those solutions together, you still may not be able to prevent a theft,” Lewis said.
A layered approach that combines vetting platforms, telematics and alerts is needed to prevent theft and recover stolen cargo, he added.
When a logistics company partnering with Verisk CargoNet falls victim to fraud or theft, that company can issue an intelligence alert, Lewis said, naming the entity whose identity appears to have become cover for cargo thieves.
Methods of fraud
Criminals can impersonate carriers through typo-squatted web domains, phishing, compromised email accounts and even voice manipulation utilizing artificial intelligence.
The typo-squatting method involves registering a slightly misspelled version of an established website to mislead users, while phishing attempts use email, phones or social media to impersonate a trusted individual or organization and trick targets into sharing passwords or other sensitive information.
The speed of freight transactions and the industry’s long-held trust in email relationships can allow several loads to be diverted before detection, Lewis and others said.
In its cargo theft analysis covering the second quarter of this year, Verisk CargoNet said business email continued to be the main means of access for many sophisticated schemes.
Compromised email accounts can yield shipment information and access to communication systems, contact directories and transportation management tools, enabling bad actors to alter shipment details while appearing legitimate to brokers, carriers, shippers and receivers, CargoNet noted.
The company said organized groups are expanding what they can obtain from a single compromised account, turning access to one business system into access to several parts of the shipment process.
Ben Barnes, chief information officer at McLeod Software, and Dacia Gulledge, the company’s integrations product manager, pointed out that criminals don’t have to create a fake carrier from scratch.
“They wear a real one’s identity, pulled from public [Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration] data, a compromised inbox or a purchased-but-dormant operating authority with a clean history,” Barnes said. “The lures now reference your actual loads, brokers and payment details, increasingly using AI-generated email and deepfake voice.”
The biggest security gap is that onboarding verification and transaction verification are not seen as separate and equally important in carrier vetting, Barnes and Gulledge said.
A carrier may have valid authority, insurance and safety records; still, a person tied to a specific load may not be legitimate.
Fighting back
Tools for carrier vetting are shifting from checking compliance to continuous behavior monitoring.
Among factors that should be scrutinized are the age of an email domain, whether a phone number is a burner using voice-over-internet-protocol, and whether the device booking a load is where the carrier claims to operate, the McLeod executives said.
To effectively protect against sophisticated fraud and theft attempts, brokers and carriers must enforce discipline and accountability in verification procedures even when operations get busy or there is pressure to make a sale.
Often overlooked is “operational drag on legitimate carriers who must monitor and correct records for loads they never hauled, and the liability exposure on the broker side,” the McLeod execs noted.
In May, the Supreme Court ruled in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that federal law does not shield freight brokers from state lawsuits claiming they negligently hired dangerous motor carriers.
Descartes Systems Group, which provides the carrier vetting platform MyCarrierPortal, recently added AuditLog, a new capability designed to help freight brokers, logistics service providers and shippers document their carrier selection processes.
Documenting carrier vetting activities “is coming under greater scrutiny” in light of the Supreme Court ruling, said Dan Cicerchi, Descartes’ executive vice president of corporate and operations development.
Descartes also introduced MacroPoint ELD+, which combines ELD tracking and mobile app tracking to support shipment validation and security.
“We’ve started to see, within the last year or so, fraudulent ELD providers popping up, and people proactively coming to us, impersonating a company that sells ELD devices,” said Andrew Wimer, associate general manager of transportation management for Descartes.
Small carriers targeted
Criminals exploiting trusted relationships often target smaller carriers, according to Demi Ramon, vice president of identity operations, and Drew Jolesch, head of identity solutions, at vetting platform Highway.
Highway is designed to help freight brokers verify carrier identity, authorize participation and ensure that carriers adhere to brokers’ security protocols.
It collects FMCSA, safety, authority and other industry data, analyzes the gathered information, and provides software integrations. The platform uses AI to automate and accelerate certificate-of-insurance verification.
Small carriers often don’t have formal security measures in place, making them an easy target for impersonation, Ramon said.
“In many cases, a bad actor is phishing the carrier, relying on the broker’s familiarity with that carrier,” she said, adding that a criminal can operate behind the scenes by routing communications to a spam inbox to try to prevent the actual carrier from seeing load conversations happening under their name.
To protect themselves, small carriers and single-truck operators can practice disciplined digital hygiene, Jolesch advised.
“Don’t reuse passwords. Make sure the links you’re clicking on are known links because what’s happening is bad actors are setting up fraudulent websites to collect your credentials,” he said, adding that the criminals then set up a hidden email and “book a bunch of freight.”
Andrey Drotenko, president of strategic partnerships for Verified Carrier, another vetting platform for carriers, brokers and shippers, said he sees a security gap in the potential for false positives: authentic companies shut out because a case of impersonation sullied their reputation.
“When there are hundreds of thousands of potential motor carriers in a loose market, you can afford to have a few false positives,” Drotenko said, “but as we move into a tighter market, you don’t have those margins.”
Source: Transport Topics
Compiled from international media by the SCI.AI editorial team.
