Types of Freight Fraud

In the truckload market, several common forms of freight fraud exist. These include double-brokering, where a carrier accepts a load and illegally rebrokers it to another party without authorization. This often creates payment disputes and security risks.

Thieves also pose as legitimate carriers, using cloned emails and falsified documents to steal freight. There is also load phishing, where scammers use lookalike email addresses to respond to load board postings and book loads through fraudulent accounts. Some bad actors steal a shipment and demand ransom from the shipper to return it or sell the load into the black market. Fuel advance scams involve fake carriers securing a load, demanding a fuel advance, and then disappearing.

More recently, when the Trump administration began demanding that Mexican carriers obtain US common carrier licenses to operate in the US, some carriers disappeared with their loads rather than go to the trouble of obtaining the new license.

Perhaps the newest form of fraud involves a bad actor buying a legitimate carrier, a small one with old equipment, to obtain their licenses, documentation, and web presence. Bad actors may continue to conduct legitimate business for several months. Eventually, they secure several high-value loads simultaneously. This becomes D-Day. They steal these loads and disappear.

The WWEX Group

The WWEX Group provides less-than-truckload (about 40% of their business), parcel (about 40%), and truckload (about 20%) services. The truckload division is the group using the Highway solution.

They are non-asset-based, meaning they don’t own trucks but instead broker loads to TL and LTL partners who carry them. Worldwide Express is their parcel network.

The Highway Solution

Highway’s technology platform specializes in carrier identity and compliance solutions to combat freight fraud. For brokers, it provides tools to instantly verify carrier identity, monitor compliance throughout a load’s lifecycle, and enhance security through their Trusted Freight Exchange. The Trusted Freight Exchange – TFX - is a secure digital marketplace, created by Highway and powered by the Triumph Network, to bring trust and control to freight transactions. TFX launched last August.

As of mid‑2025, there are 2.09 million motor carrier companies registered with the U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. The freight market has a long tail. 96% of these fleets are comprised of 20 trucks or fewer. Small companies often have poor IT infrastructures that are easy to hack.

Cybersecurity, according to Michael Caney, the chief commercial officer at Highway, has three main pillars: authentication, authorization, and capability management. “We took the principles of cybersecurity and transaction security, and we contextualized them to (freight brokerage).

“We do the same thing with motor carriers. They connect a telematics device and show us where their equipment is. We then go to the insurance agent and request a copy of their certificate of insurance. We're looking at the VINs on the telematics device, and we're corroborating the actual equipment, its location, and whether it is actually insured.”

If you have a credit card and try to use it online, you will go through a challenge-response process. You may, for example, have to give your mother’s maiden name before the purchase. This makes it more difficult for bad actors who have stolen your personal data to hack your account. Similarly, a person purporting to work for a carrier must prove that the carrier is legitimate and that they are authorized to make decisions on behalf of that carrier.

Then, they must prove capability. “If you go get a consumer loan, a mortgage, for example, the title company is going to make you log into a platform called Qualia,” Mr. Caney explained. “They are going to use Qualia to get you to connect your bank accounts so that the lender can validate the actual financial activity in your accounts. They're making you prove your capability to repay that loan.” Then, if something changes, you have $100,000 in the account at the beginning of the mortgage process, for example, but only $50,000 at closing, the transaction may be canceled.

“When we see anomalies, we're able to kick bad actors out of the system, or let a freight broker know that there's a pattern anomaly with the user.” In short, Highway is creating a network firewall around how carriers get into this authentication network.

Highway has been on an impressive growth ramp. They have grown to 1,200 freight broker customers, including 97 of the top 100, in just four years.

WWEX and Highway

Jonathan Drouin, the vice president of product strategy & design at the WWEX Group, shared his company’s experience with the Highway solution. WWEX had a solution for carrier vetting, onboarding, and monitoring, but the bad actors were becoming so much more sophisticated, and the “vectors” of fraud were changing so quickly that their legacy product was deemed outdated.

Part of Mr. Drouin’s job is to stay on top of transportation technology and identify promising new solutions. A few years ago, Highway introduced a solution that Mr. Drouin thought was “truly innovative.” Threat vectors change “every 90 days or six months.” Highway responds to these new vectors with a new solution faster than its competitors.

Some of these new solutions can seem “strange.” Highway’s TFX solution fits this description.

“One of the big threat vectors we had in the last 12 months was literally a bad actor getting a hold of a rate confirmation of ours, using ChatGPT and editing it to look real. Then a bad actor would give it to carriers.”

Remember, brokers are non-asset-based. The broker does not own the trucks or the drivers, so when the broker and carrier agree on a load, lane, and rate, the broker sends a rate confirmation to the carrier.

“And it's literally just an email,” Mr. Drouin explained, “and it has a PDF that goes to the driver (and) carrier. It says, here's where you're going to pick up, here's where you're going to deliver, here's how much we'll pay you. It's our binding contract.”

The TFX marketplace replaces these documents with a more secure marketplace-based alternative. But it was a method that required a carrier or owner operator to work in a new way. “I remember thinking, ‘there's no way this is going to work.’ If you (the carrier) want the rate confirmation from WWEX Group, you've got to log in, authenticate yourself in the Highway product, and the rate is only available there. I thought, ‘Wow, that's going to be way too much friction.’”

Nevertheless, WWEX tried TFX out. “It worked!”

“So (Highway),” Mr. Drouin continued, “takes stands. They're very bold.” They see an emerging threat. They build a solution to address that problem, even when their customers have not yet asked them to. “They really do a good job onboarding customers to that new solution and then move on to the next threat.”

Following the Implementation, an Instant Payback

“We give them a lot of credit. We're not the easiest company to work with. We've gone through a lot of mergers and acquisitions over the years. “We had three truckload TMS’s (transportation management systems) to work through.” And thus, three integrations to do.

They integrated their core TMS first. That took about 90 days because of the amount of data cleansing and testing involved.

Once implemented, the payback was almost instant. “Fraud stopped instantly,” Mr. Drouin exclaimed. It was almost six or seven months later before they had another instance of fraud.

To put this in perspective, “we're getting attacked constantly, every week, every day, every moment.”

Different products are used to address the different types of fraud. One product sits in a broker's inbox, monitoring incoming emails. “That product started warning users. “This is a bad actor emailing. Or you're being spoofed.’ So that was instant.”

One of the most expensive forms of fraud is when a truckload is stolen. This was cut by over 50% over the course of the year. But in the first seven months, no TL thefts occurred. But the bad actors from around the globe don’t stop. Some eventually discovered a new way of stealing loads.

But not all the benefits are easily quantified. WWEX had avoided doing business involving the transport of high-value electronics because of the risk of the trailer being stolen. Now, with Highway, they feel they can profitably do business with this type of cargo. “We’ve leaned into higher risk commodities over the year,’ Mr. Drouin explained.

But Highway is not a magic wand. Companies that want to achieve a strong payback have to change their internal processes. For example, if an email comes into a broker’s inbox and is flagged as yellow – meaning this is not a known bad actor, but that there could be risks dealing with this carrier – the broker needs to respect that potential risk and do some extra due diligence before working with that carrier.

Even carriers colored green should involve due diligence. The carrier’s documentation may be perfect, but if a trucker says they will pick up the load and their ELD device shows they are halfway across the country, that is, in all probability, a bad actor attempting a scam. Brokers who take an extra step and go on Highway to check the carrier’s location will avoid losses that their less diligent colleagues will not.