On Tuesday, executives at Highway — the carrier-identity platform that now screens a huge share of brokered freight — told FreightWaves that freight fraud has changed shape. It is no longer mainly fake MC numbers and forged paperwork. “What is happening with fraud is a direct attack on process,” as the company put it: thieves impersonating real carriers, intercepting load data, redirecting shipments, and using AI-generated voices to talk brokers into resending rate confirmations to new email addresses. Highway’s answer is shared vetting standards across the industry — backed by a $100,000 guarantee on loads booked through its recommendations, a guarantee it says has covered about a million loads and paid out once.

Buried in that story is the number that matters for you: Highway estimates that in a typical broker network, about 6% of carriers are ones brokers should not be using at all — and more than 82% of carriers moving brokered freight already qualify under its standards. Automated vetting is becoming the gatekeeper between your trucks and brokered freight, and it does not call to ask questions. It reads your records. If your FMCSA profile, your insurance file, and your contact footprint do not line up cleanly, the machine quietly sorts you with the 6% — and you never find out why the loads stopped coming. Today’s lesson is how to make sure that never happens: the Vet-Ready Audit, four fixes you can run this week.

Why the Screws Are Tightening Now

Two forces are converging. The first is legal. On May 14, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that federal law does not shield brokers from state negligent-selection lawsuits over the carriers they hire. Every broker in America can now be sued over a carrier choice, and their lawyers are telling them the same thing: tighten carrier qualification, demand cleaner insurance documentation, verify more. The second force is criminal. Fraud has moved upstream from stealing freight to stealing identities — as we covered when Tive found 55% of cargo thefts now start with identity fraud — so a legitimate carrier with a sloppy profile now looks, to a vetting algorithm, a lot like a thief wearing a legitimate carrier’s skin. Highway even told brokers that emailing a rate confirmation as an attachment makes a stolen load “very likely.” The vetting machines are reading everything: your registration data, your insurance certificates, your ELD integrations, your email domains. Here is how to make sure what they read is unmistakably you.

Fix One: Make Your FMCSA Record Match Reality

Start where every vetting system starts: your own SAFER and FMCSA registration record. Pull it up today and check five fields against reality — physical address, phone number, email, power units, and drivers. A carrier whose registered phone number is a dead cell line, whose address is three moves old, or whose truck count says two when you run five reads as either neglected or hijacked, and both get flagged. Vetting platforms score mismatches hard because identity thieves exploit exactly those gaps: they file a quiet change to a dormant record’s contact info and start booking loads as you. Update anything stale through your FMCSA portal account this week, then put a recurring fifteen-minute check on the calendar — monthly, the same sweep we built in the quarterly identity sweep, just faster. While you are in there, confirm your MCS-150 update isn’t overdue; an expired biennial update is the cheapest red flag you will ever hand an algorithm.

Fix Two: Get Your Insurance File Vet-Ready

Highway’s newest program certifies insurance agencies that commit to accurate certificates, VIN-level coverage detail, and immediate notice when a policy changes or cancels — because mismatched insurance paperwork is one of the most common reasons a legitimate carrier bounces out of automated vetting. Call your agent this week and ask three questions: does every truck and trailer you run appear on the policy by VIN; does the certificate name your company exactly as FMCSA has it registered, down to the LLC; and will the agency notify a broker promptly — not at renewal — when coverage changes. Then make one rule internal: any time you add a truck, drop a truck, or change insurers, the update goes to your agent and your active brokers the same day. A broker who learns from a vetting alert, instead of from you, that a truck came off your policy has just learned not to trust your paperwork — and the algorithm remembers longer than he does.

Fix Three: Lock the Handoffs Thieves Attack

The new fraud playbook attacks the seams between you and your broker: the emailed rate con, the mid-transit phone call, the “updated” delivery address. Highway’s warning about AI voice calls is not science fiction — a convincing clone of a broker’s rep, or of you, now costs a thief almost nothing. Your defense is a standing verification rule that no urgency can override, the same discipline behind the No-Divert Rule: any change to payment, pickup, delivery, or contact info gets verified by a callback to the number on the original rate confirmation — never the number that just called you. When a “broker” calls or emails asking you to resend documents or redirect anything, you and your drivers run this script:

A legitimate broker will respect that sentence every time; only a thief argues with it. Back it up with hygiene the vetting systems can see: send documents from an email address at your own domain rather than a free account, keep one phone number consistent across FMCSA, your carrier packet, and your email signature, and never forward rate confirmations through personal accounts. Every consistent touchpoint makes you easier to verify — and makes an impersonator easier to catch.

Fix Four: Stay Out of the Six Percent

Finally, know what sorts a carrier into the do-not-use pile and audit yourself against it. The common flags are mundane: authority that lapsed and reinstated without explanation, an address shared with other motor carriers, contact information that changed recently without history behind it, inspections that never seem to happen in your home state, and brand-new everything — new email, new phone, new bank — on an old MC. If any of those describe you for an innocent reason, get ahead of it: a two-line note in your carrier packet explaining the move or the reinstatement turns a red flag into a footnote. And if a vetting platform does decline you, do not shrug and move to the next load board. Ask the broker for the specific flag, fix the underlying record the same day, and ask for re-review — these platforms correct wrong data constantly, but only for carriers who ask. The same diligence you expect when you vet a broker in five minutes is now being run on you a thousand times a day. Make it boring to read your file. Boring is what gets booked.

The Bottom Line

A unanimous Supreme Court made brokers liable for who they put your freight on, and the vetting industry answered with algorithms that read your records a thousand times a day. You cannot opt out of being vetted — you can only decide what the machine finds. Run the four fixes this week: match your FMCSA record to reality, true up the insurance file by VIN, lock every handoff behind the callback rule, and audit yourself against the six-percent flags. The carriers who do will find the tightening screws are actually a gift — because every fraudster and every sloppy competitor the algorithms squeeze out leaves freight on the table for the carrier whose file is boring, consistent, and unmistakably real.

Innovative Logistics Group