WASHINGTON — After years of complaints from truckers, brokers and insurance companies, federal regulators are standing up a team specifically to deal with rampant fraud in the trucking industry.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Registration Fraud Team will work in the agency’s registration office to focus solely on assisting those who have been victims of registration fraud at the agency as well as identifying measures to help prevent it.
“It’s a small team that doesn’t exist now, but we think it will go a long way towards helping the industry,” said Ken Riddle, director of FMCSA’s Office of Registration, during a presentation at FMCSA’s annual safety research forum on Wednesday.
“We’ve heard from every corner of the industry about how bad fraud is right now, and the one thing we’ve heard loud and clear is, ‘How can FMCSA help?’ We took that very seriously, so we’re looking at every way that we can help mitigate it.”
Scammers and hackers have been able to break into FMCSA’s registration system, which is used to provide motor carrier and broker operating authority, as well as certify insurance companies providing cargo and liability insurance. They register as fake drivers and fake companies. Such illegal access has led to motor carrier identity theft and can limit the ability of the FMCSA to effectively monitor safety.
Other short-term steps FMCSA has already taken or plans to take to address the problem is suspending online PIN requests that registrants use to access their accounts to update or make changes.
“We used to send those numbers online per request, but we can’t do that anymore because there was too much fraudulent activity with that,” Riddle said. “Now the only way to get a PIN number to access an account is to request it, and we will mail it to the address on file. It’s not convenient or expeditious, but it’s a small measure we took to help reduce the fraud.”
FMCSA has also moved to multifactor authentication for all IT systems that are accessed by the public, and is tightening measures for preventing principal places of business that are registered that do not meet regulatory requirements.
“This will help prevent some of these virtual, fraudulent, fake addresses that applicants are submitting for the sole purpose of committing fraud on the industry,” Riddle said.
Longer-term measures will include hiring outside contractors to provide both identity verification services and business verification services.
“We’re going to have the 800,000 existing registrants go through this identity verification process in order to weed out the bad actors that may already exist in the system,” he noted.
Both the immediate and longer-term changes will be incorporated into an overhauled registration system to replace the current Unified Registration System.
Last week FMCSA announced it will be asking the White House Office of Management and Budget to review and approve a request to collect new information that will be used to help set up the new system.
Stephen Chechowitz
This a FMCSA. Government intrusion of data . Fraud is an issue. Yes. But I would risk fraud over Im here from the government I’m here to help. Your Telling us. Hackers broke into government files and stole the profiles of Trucking companies and now you want us to approve spying on us. We Not that Stupid sorry Not Buying it.
Linnie Peak
For the lease programs , if you are not into research and think anyone company cares enough about you to help you start your very own company! 😂. For the person going to scales for inspections, go to a truck stop . If a broker wants your to do one at the scales ??? English is what I thought on CDL drivers also ……
Donato Ruiz
FMCSA, you should also help us Truck drivers
With those lease program companies, they are scamming us, they do not give us the real prices of the loads on top of that they are keeping from 26 to 35% of the price that they say the loads are paying for which we know that it is not totally true, Because they don’t give us the rate confirmation, we only see the price that they want us to see!
Richard Keys
Now it’s time for the states and federal government to enforce the laws they put in place when we went to the CDL and put 200 thousand American truck drivers out of work. To process a CDL in the United States 🇺🇸 you must read write and speak English. So every state and the US government are breaking the law. Let’s fix this fraud in our business also.
Sheree
We need FMCSA to stand up for drivers on these lease purchase programs ripping off drivers and these brokers taking so much off the top. Let me know when that takes place.
Raymond Farrington
FMCSA should regulate the stealing these brokers are doing with the pricing of the loads given to the owner operators who are moving freight.
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Maurice Johnson
One thing needs to be done is stop these broker’s telling the carriers to go to a state police station and get inspected so you can get a ticket , if my truck looks good enough to go across a scale and they don’t stop me .. I’m not going to turn around and go in there and say hey I think you missed something look again like they are asking us to do .. Which kills our insurance at the end of the yr for a renewal.. They are discriminating against carriers and killing our work … You need to stop giving these brokers Dot or MC numbers let the carriers keep theirs ! That will separate us from them double brokering scammers…