The Big Picture
Freight fraud and cargo theft is an evolving threat, and the good guys are working hard to keep up with bad actors. But there’s no one simple answer. It takes new tools, techniques, and layers of protection.
State of Play
The industry’s anti-fraud efforts have focused heavily on carrier vetting and onboarding. Checking identities, insurance, and operating authority, screening for suspicious patterns or safety concerns, these are the key steps to stay prepared. Strong vetting remains one of the most important tools brokers have to protect their networks and their customers.
The Shifting Reality
Today’s fraud environment is opening new eyes: while vetting greatly reduces exposure, smart companies continue to protect themselves through the journey. In January 2026, Verisk CargoNet reported that estimated cargo theft losses surged 60% in 2025 to nearly $725 million, a sign that organized criminal groups are becoming more selective and targeting higher value freight.
At the same time, regulators are responding to growing abuse in carrier identity and registration processes. FMCSA now requires new registrants to complete identity proofing and verification checks through the Unified Registration System, and it restored online registration updates inside the FMCSA Portal with multi-factor authentication to improve security. Those efforts are important and necessary but only apply to new registrants. They also highlight the broader challenge facing the industry: fraud prevention increasingly depends on a mix of regulatory modernization, strong private-sector controls, and real-time operational awareness.
A New Strategy
Brokers need to build out a layered plan to stay ahead of these fraudsters. The first layer is still pre-tender fraud and risk prevention. This is where carrier identity validation, insurance verification, authority review, and onboarding play their most important role. These solutions focus on surfacing issues like operating authority concerns, suspicious FMCSA activity, insurance irregularities, registration inconsistencies, and identity-related red flags. Worthwhile strategies also incorporate practical safeguards such as VIN verification with location validation, customizable onboarding standards, and monitoring tied to contact changes and affiliations.
Those capabilities matter because fraud and risk prevention starts with keeping bad actors out, which is why FMCSA’s recent warning to carriers not to buy or sell DOT numbers is so important. The warning reflects a broader concern across the industry: bad actors continue to look for ways to misuse identities, registrations, and operating credentials to appear legitimate. For brokers, it is another reminder that strong onboarding and identity validation remain essential, and that private-sector vetting tools play an important role in helping identify suspicious entities before they enter the network.
But as every broker knows, the load journey does not end when the carrier is approved.
A carrier may pass vetting and still present risk later. The documentation may appear sound. The authority may be active. The onboarding process may work exactly as intended. Yet suspicious behavior can still emerge at pickup, during tracking, or while the shipment is already in transit. That is not a failure of onboarding. It is a reflection of how fraud evolves in the real world.
This is why post-tender monitoring deserves more attention as part of a broker’s fraud prevention strategy.
Once a shipment is covered, the focus shifts from static qualification data to live operational behavior. The question is no longer only whether the carrier passed vetting; it is also whether the shipment is behaving as expected. Are the location signals credible? Do movement patterns align with what the broker should be seeing? Are there anomalies that suggest spoofing, emulation, or other attempts to conceal what is really happening?
The Power of Visibility
Visibility data can play a meaningful role in the fight against fraud, not just in service and exception management. This data can exist as the post-tender and in-transit layer that complements pre-tender protections, helping brokers monitor shipments for suspicious signals after the load has been booked. The core idea is straightforward: carrier vetting is the first line of defense, and post-tender monitoring is an important second layer.
Visibility data drives additional protection across pre-tender, pre-pickup, and in-transit workflows, with alerts designed to help identify suspicious behavior such as limited tracking history, data spoofing, route deviations, and other deception indicators. In 2026 alone, Descartes MacroPoint’s FraudGuard feature has surfaced over 385,000 alerts of potentially fraudulent or suspicious behavior, including 111,000 spoofed location pings, and 61,000 loads using a VoIP phone number.
The larger takeaway for brokers is that visibility is no longer only a service tool. Increasingly, it’s a security tool helping prevent disruption and minimize financial risk.
That distinction matters because the threat continues to evolve around traditional checkpoints. Theft-by-deception groups are expected to increase their focus on misdirecting shipments tendered to legitimate carriers. In other words, even when the front-end controls work, bad actors may still try to exploit the load later in the process.
Stay Layered, Stay Protected
The goal is not to choose between vetting and visibility. It is to connect them. The strongest fraud prevention strategies begin with disciplined onboarding and carrier qualification. They continue through the life of the shipment with monitoring that helps brokers recognize suspicious behavior early and respond before a problem becomes a loss. One layer reduces exposure before freight is assigned. The next layer helps protect the load once it is moving.
Fraud and theft are not going away, and neither is the pressure on brokers to move quickly, maintain trusted capacity relationships, and protect customers in a complex operating environment. In this world, the brokers best positioned to fight fraud and risk will be the ones who think beyond a single checkpoint. They will build layered defenses that start with strong onboarding and continue all the way through the journey.
Because in today’s market, risk does not end post-tender. It travels with the load.
