Freight fraud is a multi-billion-dollar problem, and the old verification model is broken. Here’s the new standard every broker needs to build toward in 2026.
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Freight fraud is a multi-billion-dollar problem, and the old verification model is broken. Here’s the new standard every broker needs to build toward in 2026.
Freight digitized the transaction. It never secured it.
For decades, an MC number lookup on SAFER and a certificate of insurance were the whole vetting process. It worked not because it was rigorous, but because the fraud hadn’t evolved yet. And as Highway Founder and CEO explained on a recent FreightCaviar podcast: Those days are over, and they aren’t coming back.
Freight fraud is now a multi-billion dollar problem operating at industrial scale. The old “PDF and a prayer” approach has officially run out of road. The industry that built itself on relationships and handshakes is being forced to rebuild on something sturdier: verified identity, layered accountability, and enforceable standards baked into the transaction itself.
Freight’s credentialing infrastructure was never designed for adversarial conditions.
Today, five separate parties credentialize a motor carrier: the broker, the insurance agent, the telematics provider, the factoring company, and the shipper. Each one makes decisions based on data provided by the others. None of them operates under a shared accountability mechanism. And the integrity of that data is not equal across the chain.
The industry has been making hiring and load decisions based on data it has no real way to verify, and no obligation to stand behind if something goes wrong. For a long time, that was fine. Volume was lower. Fraud was opportunistic. The math worked.
It doesn’t anymore. Thousands of carrier email inboxes have been compromised. Fraudsters don’t just impersonate carriers; they operate inside carrier accounts, intercept rate confirmations, redirect payments, and move on before anyone notices the load never arrived.
The fraud problem isn’t just volume. It’s velocity and coordination.
Fraudsters are now running coordinated schemes across multiple vectors simultaneously:
The answer is friction placed precisely, at the right anomaly points, without generating noise for legitimate operators who’ve done nothing wrong.
Fraud will never be fully eliminated. The goal is calculated risk management: identifying non-conforming behavior early enough to route around it. And critically, every routing decision made outside a verified standard is a security decision, whether you recognize it that way or not.
Graft was direct about how this plays out in a hot market: when capacity tightens and profit pressure mounts, some brokers will ignore fraud warnings to keep freight moving. That’s a culture problem that no one platform can fix on its own.
The clearest structural shift the industry needs is one it hasn’t fully named yet: bifurcation.
Not every load carries the same risk profile. The industry needs a working definition of what conforming freight looks like and a corresponding framework for how non-conforming freight gets priced, communicated, and risk-assessed.
Conforming freight means:
Not assumed. Not spot-checked. Confirmed at load time. The point-of-pickup handoff, historically a single data point like a PO number or a phone call, has to become a multi-factor confirmation event.
“It’s no longer going to be enough to permit access because the PO number is just a single point. You’re going to need multiple points that have to all match in order to unlock access.” — Jordan Graft, CEO at Highway
That’s the direction driver-level identity verification (IDV) is heading — facial recognition matched to a driver’s license, confirmed in real time at the facility door. PO numbers as sole access credentials are already effectively obsolete.
The same logic applies to rate confirmation workflows. PDF rate cons sent as email attachments are a deprecated format. As Graft noted: “Banks at some point sent bank statements as attachments to emails. That stopped when fraud caused it to stop.” The same trend is in motion for freight. MFA links, not attachments, are where rate con delivery is heading.
When freight fraud happens today, brokers absorb the liability while every data provider in the chain says it’s not their problem.
The insurance agent certified the policy. The factoring company processed the payment. The telematics provider reported the location. The vetting platform cleared the MC. And yet when a load disappears, the broker, who made a good-faith decision based on that distributed data, is holding the bag.
That indicates an accountability architecture problem.
The model that actually works is one where enforceability is built into the transaction itself, and is not dependent on a broker making the right call under time pressure. Every party that contributes data to a hiring or booking decision needs to stand behind that data, including at the driver level.
Highway’s framing for the Trusted Freight Exchange (TFX) reflects this logic. The distinction Graft draws between a marketplace and an exchange matters: “A marketplace seeks to consolidate power into itself… An exchange is a steward of the resources given to it by its participants, and it serves the kings who are the participants.” The goal isn’t platform capture. It’s infrastructure that serves the entire transaction.
The security posture most brokerages are running today was designed for a fraud environment that no longer exists. Three areas to redirect energy:
Trust can’t be assumed. It has to be continuously verified at every stage of the load lifecycle.
The future of freight security isn’t a single product or a single compliance rule. It’s a shared accountability model where every party that touches a transaction — broker, carrier, insurer, factoring company, data provider — bears responsibility for their piece of it.
Brokers who build that standard into their operations now will be positioned to take on risk profitably. Those who don’t will face mounting pressure to consolidate or exit as the industry’s tolerance for unverified transactions continues to shrink.
The era of high-trust freight is over. What replaces it is being built right now.
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