How to Verify a Carrier Before Pickup: 7 Checks That Stop Freight Fraud

The load was tendered to a real carrier. The MC number checked out. The driver arrived inside the appointment window, presented the paperwork, signed, and pulled away. Three days later the freight has not arrived, and the carrier named on the bill of lading has never heard of the driver.

That is what cargo theft looks like now. The industry spent a decade hardening yards, fencing lots, and adding cameras, so the criminals moved upstream into the paperwork. Verisk CargoNet recorded 2,646 confirmed cargo thefts in 2025, up 18% from 2,243 the year before, with estimated losses near $725 million. That is a 60% jump in a single year, and the growth is not coming from broken locks.

Here is what the current schemes actually look like, and the seven checks that stop most of them before a trailer leaves your dock.

What is freight fraud?

Freight fraud is cargo theft carried out with credentials rather than force. Instead of breaking into a yard, the thief presents as a legitimate carrier: valid or stolen operating authority, paperwork that matches your system, and a driver who arrives on time and behaves normally. The load is released voluntarily and never arrives. The category covers fictitious pickups, carrier impersonation, double brokering, and the newer hybrid schemes that run through a genuine carrier's compromised email account.

The distinction matters because the two problems have opposite defenses. Physical theft is solved with fences, lighting, seals, and guards. Fraud is solved with verification, and verification happens before the truck ever shows up.

The numbers, and why New Jersey shippers should pay attention

The headline counts look almost reassuring. Verisk CargoNet logged 767 supply chain crime events across the US and Canada in Q1 2026, down 5.3% year over year and down 12.2% from Q4 2025. Estimated Q1 losses were $131.58 million, essentially flat against the year before.

Then Q2 landed. Estimated losses reached $304.6 million against $135.7 million in Q2 2025, more than double, even as incident volume stayed soft. Fewer events, far larger hauls. That is what it looks like when organized groups pick targets deliberately instead of taking whatever is unattended.

The regional picture is where it gets local. California remains the worst state at 277 incidents in Q1 2026. But New Jersey jumped to 59 incidents, up 119% from 27 a year earlier, moving it past Texas into second place nationally. If your freight moves through the Port of New York and New Jersey corridor, your exposure roughly doubled in twelve months while the national number was falling.

Commodity selection tells the same story. Food and beverage led at 144 events, and personal care and beauty products rose 178% year over year to 50 events. These are not high-security categories. They are easy to liquidate and nobody serializes a pallet of shampoo.

Separately, Overhaul's Q1 2026 analysis of its own 574-incident dataset found deceptive pickup schemes up 31% year over year. Different data, same direction.

There is a timing problem layered on top of all this. Capacity is tight, tender rejections are running in the low teens against a sub-5% baseline a year ago, and spot rates are 38% above last year. When a carrier rejects a tendered load and someone has four hours to cover it, vetting is the first thing that gets skipped. The fraud pressure and the capacity pressure are arriving together, and that is not a coincidence.

The three schemes doing most of the damage

1. The embedded driver

Sometimes called a Trojan horse scheme. A crew member hires on as a legitimate driver at an established, well-rated carrier, which means they clear every vetting platform you might check, because the carrier really is clean. They accept a load, park it somewhere prearranged, and walk away. Accomplices collect the trailer. The driver gets fired for abandoning the load, which was always the plan, and repeats the cycle at the next carrier.

2. Email system infiltration

Criminals compromise a carrier's email system and operate from inside it, bidding on loads as the carrier, arranging pickups, re-brokering freight, and deleting the evidence behind them. The more sophisticated version registers a lookalike domain and intercepts the conversation, so both sides believe they are talking to each other. Everything about the thread is correct except who is on the other end.

3. The pickup counter itself

The weakest link is consistently the point of pickup, for unglamorous reasons: high turnover and thin training. The person deciding whether a truck leaves with $80,000 of freight is often the newest employee in the building, working from a checklist that was written before any of these schemes existed.

7 checks before you release a load

None of these require software you do not already have. They require that somebody actually does them, every time, including on the load that is already running late.

1. Pull the authority yourself, do not read the packet.

Look the MC number up in the FMCSA SAFER system while the load is still being planned. You are checking three things beyond active status: how long the authority has been in force, whether the business address changed recently, and whether the name on the authority matches the name on your rate confirmation exactly. Freshly reactivated authority on a dormant MC number is one of the most common tells in an impersonation case.

2. Call back on a number you found, not one you were sent.

If a carrier's email has been compromised, every phone number in that thread belongs to the thief. Take the number from the FMCSA record or the carrier's own website and call it cold. Ask them to confirm the load number, the driver name, and the pickup window. This single step defeats most email infiltration schemes, and it costs about ninety seconds.

3. Read the email domain character by character.

Lookalike domains are the workhorse of this category, and they are designed to survive a glance. A swapped letter, an added hyphen, a .co instead of .com, or a capital I standing in for a lowercase l. Compare the sender domain against the domain in the FMCSA record rather than against the last email in the thread, because the thread itself may have started with the fake.

4. Match the driver and the tractor to the dispatch, not just the load number.

Require the carrier to send the driver's full name and the tractor and trailer numbers in advance, then check them at the gate. Knowing the load number proves nothing: it is in the emails the thief already has. This is the check that catches the Trojan horse driver, where someone hired on at a legitimate carrier specifically to take one load and be fired afterward.

5. Photograph the driver, the ID, the plate, and the trailer before you load.

Take pictures at the dock every time, not only when something feels off. It changes behavior on the spot, and when a load does go missing it is the difference between a recoverable investigation and a shrug. Include the seal number in the photo set once the trailer is closed, and attach the images to the bill of lading record.

6. Refuse same-day carrier substitutions on anything valuable.

"Our truck broke down, we are sending a partner" is the standard opening line for a double brokering handoff. A legitimate carrier can absorb a rescheduled appointment. Build it into the contract: no substitution inside twenty-four hours without written approval, and the replacement gets vetted from scratch rather than inheriting the original carrier's clearance.

7. Reserve high-value loads for drivers with tenure.

Brokers increasingly require that drivers on high-value freight have been employed by the carrier for at least six months. It is a blunt instrument, and it works, because the embedded-driver scheme depends on being new. Pair it with real training for your own dock staff, who are the people actually deciding whether a truck leaves. Point of pickup is consistently identified as the weakest link in the chain, and it is usually the least trained position in the building.

Why this is your 3PL's problem, not just yours

Carrier vetting is not a one-time gate. Authority status changes, insurance lapses, email accounts get compromised, and a carrier that was clean in January can be a problem in August. Doing this properly means re-checking at tender, maintaining a known-carrier list with real history behind it, and having enough carrier relationships that covering a rejected load does not mean gambling on a stranger.

That is a large part of what you are buying when you outsource freight. A 3PL running consistent volume through the same lanes knows which carriers actually show up, has the leverage to refuse a suspicious substitution, and can absorb a rescheduled pickup instead of handing the load to whoever answered the phone. It is also why transparent billing and clear chain of custody matter beyond the invoice: if you cannot see who touched your freight, you cannot tell when something is wrong.

If you are shipping high-value goods, our guide to shipping high-value items safely covers the packaging and labeling side, which is the other half of this problem.

The takeaway

Cargo theft stopped being a physical security problem and became a verification problem. The losses are concentrating into fewer, larger incidents, New Jersey has become one of the highest-risk states in the country, and the tight capacity market is actively pushing shippers to skip the exact checks that would catch the scheme. The seven checks above are boring, and that is the point. They work because fraud depends on somebody being in a hurry.

If you want a second set of eyes on how your freight is being vetted, or you would rather hand the carrier relationships to someone who does this daily, book a call with our team.

New to logistics terminology? Our 3PL Dictionary breaks down double brokering, drayage, and the other terms in this post. For more market commentary, visit the 3PL Center blog.