Freight fraud has a funny way of showing up all at once. Things will be quiet for weeks, and then suddenly every agent seems to be grappling with a stolen load on the same afternoon. It doesn’t help that all the scammers out there keep on changing their playbooks. As soon as the industry catches on to one of their tricks, they’ve already moved to the next one.
“It’s definitely trending up for the most part,” says Kristen Gile, our Operations Manager here at Tallgrass. She and our compliance team spend their days tracking down bad actors so agents can stay focused on their customers. We sat down with Kristen to talk about how Tallgrass spots fraud and what to do when something feels off.
Scammers Are Getting Smarter
The most damaging scheme that Kristen is seeing right now is impersonation. This happens when a fraudster hacks into a real carrier’s email, or creates a lookalike address, and then uses that identity to double-broker or steal the load. When an MC gets shut down or racks up bad reports, the people behind it often just start a new one, and that can make the small details easy to miss.
“People are moving so fast to get loads covered that they don’t always take a second to really read what they’re looking at,” Kristen explains. All they have to do is swap a single letter in an email address, and no one is the wiser. Thieves also know exactly what’s on the truck when they book from the load board, so we’re seeing high-value freight like tires and golf carts being the prime targets of these scams. And when a load worth $100,000 goes missing, the damage goes beyond the money, because it can really shake the trust an agent has spent years building with that customer.
How We’re Staying a Step Ahead
Every new carrier gets onboarded through MyCarrierPackets (MCP), and the invite will only go to a verified email on the carrier’s account. If an address is made-up, it won’t get through the door.
Once a carrier is all set up, MCP keeps quietly sleuthing in the background. If it sniffs out fraud reported on a carrier, it pulls their insurance from the system, and because MCP talks directly to our CRM, that carrier can’t be assigned to a load. From there, Kristen’s team checks whether the carrier is on any live loads with us and gets the agent on the phone, hopefully before pickup, so the shipper knows not to load the truck. Kristen and her team also keep a close eye on Carrier411 for any new FreightGuard reports on carriers that we may already be using. If something pops up, that carrier will be blocked so no other Tallgrass agent can book them.
VIN checks have become another go-to for us. Agents can run a truck’s VIN through MCP, and if it comes back belonging to a different carrier, our compliance team will pick up the phone and call that carrier’s insurance company to ask whether the truck is actually on their policy. Sometimes there’s a simple explanation behind it, since trucks are being bought and sold all the time. However, when insurance says no, we start digging for answers. “There are cases where the carrier technically passes all of our rules,” Kristen explains. “But with all of that false information they’re using, we know something fishy is going on.”
A lot of agents are watching for a big, glaring red X that shouts don’t use this carrier, but Kristen knows the warning signs are usually a lot quieter than that. She’ll check how often a carrier has changed its address, banking info, or phone number, or why a carrier that hasn’t filled out a packet in a year suddenly wants to complete one for us. Any one of those signs may turn out to be nothing, but Kristen has learned to pay close attention to the small stuff — especially when things start piling up. “It makes one big red flag when there’s a lot of little pink flags waving at you,” she says.
The team has been absolutely crushing it, catching anywhere from 2 to 3 scams per week trying to weasel their way in. Kristen says that she’s seen double brokering drop off dramatically since she first stepped into her compliance role. “I thought double brokering was just something that happened every day and we have to deal with it,” she says. “It’s been wonderful and wild to see that slowly declining.” She credits that downtrend to agents being more educated, MCP (of course!), and shippers who are willing to help verify trucks when they show up.
Trust Your Gut, Then Tell Compliance
As Sean Richardson likes to say, if it smells fishy, it probably is, and Kristen agrees. “Sometimes you just get that feeling in your gut. Sometimes you can’t even explain it,” she says. “I always tell agents to trust that instinct.” If something feels sketchy, email compliance right away with as much detail as you have. A note on the carrier’s profile is helpful, but it doesn’t send us any type of alert. Providing a full explanation lets our team block the carrier, hold pay on a previous load if needed, and document what’s happened for the next agent who gets a call from them.
If the worst does happen and fraud hits a load, Kristen’s advice is to do your homework before you pick up the phone. “Their first questions are going to be, what are you going to do to fix it?” she says. Walking in with a clear picture of what happened and what you’re already doing about it shows customers they’ve got an agent they can trust, even on a rough day. That kind of honesty and follow-through goes a long way toward keeping a relationship strong for the long haul.
We Live for the Catch
For Kristen and the compliance team, getting a bad carrier blocked is one of the best parts of the job. “To me, it’s like, we could have just saved an agent thousands of dollars,” she says. She also loves when agents call to ask how they can sharpen their own vetting, and she’s always happy to walk through exactly what she looks for.
That kind of hands-on help makes a big difference for newer agents, and for anyone coming from a brokerage that never had these safeguards in place. If you want a team that has your back and is in your corner every step of the way, let’s talk. Reach out to us so we can chat about joining the Tallgrass Team.