ATLANTA — Jordan Graft sees a lot of corruption, bad actors and fraudsters in the trucking industry.
“People used to be able to hire a carrier based on three emails, passing a rules assessment and an insurance certification and that’s just not possible anymore. The world’s just changed,” Graft, founder and CEO of Highway, said at FreightWaves’ Future of Supply Chain event.
Graft was joined on stage Wednesday by FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller in a discussion titled “Trucking Fraud and Cybercrime Briefing.”
“We see fraud at almost every layer, whether it’s the insurance: Whether it’s the ELD layer, whether it’s email phishing, fraud is everywhere. They’re trying to get in at every point of access of a freight broker,” Graft said.
Dallas-based Highway is focused on solving the digital identity problem in the trucking industry. The firm aims to remove risk and friction between brokers and carriers by being an onboarding provider with a carrier identity engine.
Identity theft, double brokering and other types of fraud are costing the trucking industry over $100 million annually, according to experts.
Fraud and carrier identification must be addressed through layers of security, Graft said.
“You have to have a multilayered solution that’s looking at not just does this carrier pass my overall company’s rules assessment, but what type of freight am I willing to give that carrier?” Graft said. “That’s the evolution that I think is the most fundamentally changing of what Highway is. Now we’re saying, OK, they may pass, but this carrier doesn’t get access to consumer electronic loads out of Southern California, or they don’t get access to high-value loads for this shipper.”
He said security is about removing friction from the process of carrier-broker relationships.
“We allow brokers to do load level compliance and change the requirements, and that’s so important in this industry, in this market right now, because you have to reduce friction,” Graft said. “You can’t put friction on the entire business; you have to let certain things move really quickly, like your bottled water loads or your low-risk, low-value loads. Those need to be able to move quickly and not put a lot of friction on your carrier sales team to get those loads covered.”
A sense of security with high-value loads is important to brokers, Graft said.
“You want to focus your effort and energy and any compliance or risk function, you want to put that stuff in a matrix and focus on the ones that have the highest risk so that you don’t overly burden the entirety of the business,” he said. “How that relates to the freight brokers and their ability to serve shippers is that we think we make our brokers better. That’s our job. We don’t serve shippers. We don’t sell to shippers. We never will. We serve one master, and it’s really important that we make our brokers better and make them the hero.”
Cliff H
Simple solution….get rid of the brokers!The trucking industry you to be good,now it’s a race to the bottom!Glad I retired!
Johnny Cook
Brokers can’t be the hero when they’re double brokering loads at every turn to put more money in their own pockets and leaving the carriers struggling to pay their drivers
Scott
The fraudulent actors seems to be these 3rd party vendors who illegally obtain information about Motor Carriers company profiles that isn’t listed publicly by the FMCSA who then, report that information to brokers. When the carrier updates this private information, these 3rd party vendors don’t have instant access to the FMCSA’s private information. In the meantime while they wait for their illegally obtained data to come from their “source”, they flag Motor Carriers and accuse them of fraud and sever relationships. They’re creating the PROBLEMS by claiming prevent or “fixing” them for their job security. We need more shipper-carrier relationships and less “Hero”-3rd party vendor relationships.
Jim Pence
“We serve one master, and it’s really important that we make our brokers better and make them the hero.”
That’s a very disturbing statement for us that are carriers. Once again, we are dealing with the twisted view that brokers are the ones that really matter when it’s the carriers that make this world operate…..not brokers!!!
Kahn
I have trucking company working since 2018, but with the new AI system and highway complicated our process with brokers, it creates more problems for us. They are marking transport companies with high risk easily to brokers.
Highway creates a lot of problems for both of us, they mark you with different issues without any proof, even brokers are not happy with them. I work with brokers for than 6 six years, now when they see my profile on highway they are surprised, what has been reported under my profile.
They need to hire professional truckers and brokers to work with them.
Lute Diaz
Trucking is a very fluid industry. In the name of cutting costs shippers use electronic platforms to get a better deal. When in fact the better deal is the trucker that likes to stay on a reliable supply lane . He is the guy who is not going to stray or screw up pickups/deliveries. The bigger the contract the greedier the contract holder and his hiring practices go out the window. O/O ‘s are the backbone those are the guys who live off their hard work. For many years I was the’get it there’ truck for a shipper when the big companies would faulted.
Matthew Ensley
Moat fraudulent companies have identifying markers that an experienced broker can read relatively quickly. When brokers identify bad actors and report to loadboards and fmcsa the problem takes too long to address. FMCSA and load boards need to bare a much larger percentage of the responsibility to take quick action. I’d suggest working with veteran brokers to establish some sort of channel of enforcement. They need to stop talking about fraud and do something about it with the authority and resources they have. If I was a cynical person, which I am, I’d put money on the fox guarding the hen house. It looks like crash, consolidation, and control by the big players.
Anonymous
Everything will b fixed if, all overseas operations related to ELD’s, Customer services, dispatch services are barred/ stopped. People from india are selling info, making money and taking huge chunks of money out of hard working owner operators with the help of fleets owned by shady investors from india. Plz dnt show my email and name.