"Fraud Has Moved to the Pickup. Vetting Still Stops at the MC Number"
Carrier vetting confirms that an MC number is active and insured. It does not confirm that the person backing into the dock is the driver who was assigned to the load. Deceptive pickups sit in that gap. Brokers have been asked to add fraud checks to systems that were never built to hold them. The operational pressure is that the check arrives after the freight has already moved, or not at all.
Jonathan Salama, co-founder and chief executive of Transfix, said in written comments to The Supply Chainer: “Fraud has moved to the pickup, and most brokerages’ defenses haven’t followed it. Carrier vetting tells you the MC number is legitimate. It doesn’t tell you the person backing into the dock is the driver you booked. Deceptive pickups live in that gap, and brokers have been asked to bolt fraud prevention onto systems never built to support it.” Transfix ran a digital brokerage for more than a decade. It placed the check at dispatch, inside the TMS.
When a driver is assigned, the pickup number stays locked until identity is confirmed. The process uses biometric and liveness matching against the CDL, truck and phone, plus image review that catches a doctored license or paper taped over a DOT number. A representative on a phone call will not catch those. The check takes under two minutes and runs on every load, not only high-value lanes. Operations teams face fewer judgment calls under time pressure. Compliance receives an auditable record of every check, image and score stored against the load. Fraud teams act on a flag before the freight moves rather than reconstructing the incident afterward.
The same shift is already documented. In prior Supply Chainer coverage of strategic cargo theft, Sam Agyemang, vice president of business development at ITF Group, said: “Cargo theft is no longer a back-lot problem. It’s a systems problem. The industry talks about stolen trailers, but the real vulnerability is a weak process. High-value freight is being targeted through identity spoofing, digital manipulation, and operational complacency.” Brian Jacobsen described the same pattern: “Over the past decade, we've seen cargo theft evolve from opportunistic, armed robberies into strategic, data-driven, organized crime operations. The most common risk we’re seeing today is identity-based fraud - bad actors infiltrating carrier networks by impersonating trusted partners through compromised emails, using stolen credentials, or acquiring seasoned MC numbers through off-record sales.”
A check that runs after the driver has already left the dock arrives too late. The remaining operational question is whether the authentication step stays inside the dispatch workflow on every load, or whether it remains an exception process that only activates after a loss has already been reported.
