The freight transportation industry has been increasingly impacted by identity theft, according to Kendra Tucker, CEO of Truckstop.
Tucker was the guest on the latest episode of Fuller Speed Ahead, hosted by FreightWaves CEO and founder Craig Fuller. The show aired during FreightWaves’ Small Fleet & Owner-Operator Summit on Wednesday.
“Identity theft is something that we’ve seen really tick up in the past couple of months or so, where carriers who are not actively driving are selling their active motor carrier numbers to fraudulent actors,” Tucker said. “What the carriers don’t realize is that even though they might make a quick hit of money, those fraudulent actors are then using those motor carrier numbers to steal their identity.”
Boise, Idaho-based Truckstop is one of the largest load board and freight marketplaces in the U.S., connecting carriers, brokers and shippers.
In addition to identity theft, other types of fraud, including double brokering, plague the industry — at a cost of over $100 million annually, according to experts.
Tucker said Truckstop has contacted the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration about the rise in identity theft on the company’s platform.
“There are definitely legitimate ways to go about selling your motor carrier number,” she said. “What we see are people selling their motor carrier numbers for relatively low prices. What we talked about with the FMCSA is that being able to sell your motor carrier number was actually designed more for absorbing a whole company and then changing the contact information over to the new owner.”
Instead, Tucker said, fraudsters are purchasing legitimate motor carrier numbers but don’t change any of the personal contact information associated with it.
“It becomes almost like a paid-for identity theft. That is really victimizing carriers in particular,” she said.
Truckstop and other load boards are coming together to address freight fraud, including identity theft and double brokering, to weed out the bad actors on their platforms, Tucker said.
“I was just listening to a panel yesterday, where even competitors are coming together to say it is time to do quite a bit of education for particularly smaller carriers and smaller brokers to make sure they understand what’s really at risk,” she said. “Education is number one. Number two, Truckstop and other companies are rolling out things like identity validation.”
The Truckstop platform has added layers to make sure that the people setting up accounts with the company are who they say they are. Tucker said it helps protect carriers from someone stealing their identities.
“In fairness, Truckstop has been doing this for decades … but part of what we’ve added is identification verification,” she said. “So now we are having someone take a selfie of themselves and then upload their driver’s license so we can confirm that there’s a real human who actually matches the contact information that they’ve given us. It’s really important for our carriers just to protect their businesses.”
How long will the freight recession last?
Fuller and Tucker also discussed how much longer the freight transportation market will remain in a recession.
“This has been a pretty abysmal couple years. We’re in the third year of the great freight recession,” Fuller said. “What are you hearing on the ground from brokers and carriers? What is the sort of mood right now?”
Tucker said she was recently having dinner with a few broker customers who said 2024 may not have the uptick that others were forecasting at the start of the year.
“I think that everybody still agrees that we’ve seen the bottom,” she said. “I think the question is, how long will we persist in this state? I would say, we are resolved to get through the year, but the optimism has tamped down just just a little bit.”
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