The Freight Fraud Epidemic

Brent – 00:00:01:

Welcome to Freight Nation, a Trucking Podcast, where we explore the fascinating world of trucking and freight management. We dive deep into the freight industry and uncover why the trucking industry is more crucial to our country now than ever before. Stay tuned to uncover the driving forces behind successful trucking businesses and hear from the hardworking truckers and leaders who keep the world moving. Let’s hit the road. All right, Freight Nation, welcome back to another episode of Freight Nation, a podcast by Truckstop. And this is a part of our educational series on one of the most challenging topics that Freight’s ever seen. I’ve been around Freight for 26 years and I’ve been through a lot of things. And I’ve never seen a marketplace more challenging now. And I’m not just talking about the rate recession that we’ve had since the pandemic. I’m talking about the F word, the other F word, the fraud word that’s in the marketplace. And so Truckstop takes this very seriously. We’re thankful that you’ve joined us today to learn a bit more about fraud in the marketplace. What started it? Why does it continue? Where are some of the areas in which it’s continuing to attack? What are some of the solutions? We’ll talk through that as well today. And then we’ll talk about future stance in the marketplace because fraud’s not going to be going away. And we’ll talk a lot about why that’s going to happen too. So joining me today is one of my great friends at Truckstop, Mr. Shawn Rasmor. And that’s Shawn with SHAWN. He is a principal product manager and his principal focus is on our fraud prevention products. And so he’s been the guy that’s been digging in, understanding, trying to create good technical barriers for the bad players to stay out of the marketplace and to protect you. And so, Shawn, thank you so much for joining me on Freight Nation today. I’ve been excited to have you on. Shawn and I have a great relationship. You’ll see us talking back and forth like a couple of good friends, which we are. But I lean on him. Anytime I need to know more about what’s going on in fraud and how we’re working towards helping defeat that in the marketplace. I talked to Shawn because he has such deep knowledge of it and has a passion, a real passion for protecting all the players, the carriers, the brokers and the shippers in this marketplace. So, Shawn, thank you again for joining me on Freight Nation today.

Shawn – 00:02:15:

Thank you, Brent. I’m excited to be here and help the community, help the industry. This is a situation that requires all of us to be extra vigilant, whether you’re a technology provider, you’re a broker, you’re a carrier, everybody is involved in helping make this a safe market so we can all be successful.

Brent – 00:02:32:

Yeah, no doubt. I appreciate you saying it’s going to take all of us because I know that when all the fraud started, Shawn, a lot of people looked at the major players in the marketplace. They looked at load boards like Truckstop and other competitors in the marketplace, and they really said, oh, well, that’s where the problem is. And they didn’t realize that the problem has invaded all parts of trucking. And it’s not just on load boards. It’s on everybody that moves freight. If you have a piece of data. In the marketplace, if you get an email, if you get a text message, if you’re out there looking for freight on all the multitudes of platforms, whether they be open marketplaces like Truckstop’s or whether they be private marketplaces like the brokers have out there and other players have out in the marketplace, then you have the opportunity for your data to be compromised and for you to be the victim of fraudulent activity in the marketplace. So Shawn, talk a little bit about that, about how it really is all the market. It’s not focused in just one area.

Shawn – 00:03:27:

Yeah. There’s a misnomer on the surface area for where fraud can occur. And really, it’s every touchpoint. And if you think outside of transportation, it’s your day-to-day life where you get a text message, you get an email, anything around that where they’re trying to compromise your identity and get access to your financial funds personally. Well, they’re doing the same thing, but with freight. They’re trying to get access to that load. They’re trying to compromise the identity of an existing carrier, or they’re changing their tactics on that before they would go and create a new carrier out there. They’d register carriers. And so the industry would create provisions around the age of authority or other tactics. Well, they’re learning and adapting continuously. And they’re hitting people not only on load boards and those areas, but through emails, through trying to get a hold of your people, your employees and take advantage of lapses in, say, judgment. But it’s difficult because it’s difficult to identify a bad actor when something comes in. And who is the bad actor? Who is a legitimate carrier? But it is every area, a phone call, an email. However your teams are getting contacted, they need to be extra vigilant on looking for signals, which are becoming harder and harder.

Brent – 00:04:51:

Right. It seems like, Shawn, I know a few years back, even a company like Truckstop, we were suspected of a cybersecurity compromise in our system. And so even somebody who had great cybersecurity, we were attacked with a ransomware attack. And so it was a very difficult thing for us to get through. I think about the cybersecurity in this marketplace. And so you were talking about all the ways in which data is being used for our marketplace to work more efficiently. But that opens doors in a lot of places for this to be compromised. Talk a little bit about that aspect of how fraud attacked this market.

Shawn – 00:05:23:

Yeah, you talked about the opportunity. There’s a variety of situations here. And so part of it is ease of access. It’s technology. What kind of technology do you have in place? And a lot of the things, we try to make it frictionless, make it easy for our people. If I’m a broker for my team, be able to operate easily for carriers, be able to onboard, and come through processes. How do we make it simple? Well, if it’s simple for your employees or simple for a carrier, it’s simple for a bad actor to compromise that system. So they’re finding ways within there. And so now we’re adding more and more security, more provisions in place, which then you have to balance it. Because if you make it to Fort Knox, you can’t do business. So how do you add the right levels within there? But it’s not just the technology. It’s people. It’s processes and the technology. These things all go hand in hand and how you utilize it. But ultimately, it comes down to your people and how they’re working. And you talked about within Truckstop, the situation we had that was on an IT level or technology level. But even within the marketplace, our assurance team, which Truckstop has an assurance team, has been around since 2003.

Brent – 00:06:40:

Now, you said assurance, not insurance. Assurance.

Shawn – 00:06:43:

Assurance. And within that, they have a security team that is continuously monitoring our systems, not from a technology IT information security standpoint, but from a marketplace security standpoint. And they handle fraud complaints and double brokering complaints coming in from our community, as well as monitoring other situations within that. But they have a term of Fraud Friday. And this is when you talk about when bad actors attack, which at any time, and from an opportunity standpoint, they’ll try and hit you at a point of weakness. When people want to go home, when people want to go on vacation, they’re opportunists. Their business is making money off of other people. And so trying to attack, looking at, okay, they’re going to hit on a Friday. They’re going to hit on a Friday before a three-day weekend. Because when you want to go home, you’re going to want to make a decision faster. And so again, down to the person level and then layering that with technology, with processes and protocols to help provide guardrails. If the guardrails are too tight, your teams can’t operate effectively.

Brent – 00:07:52:

Right, for sure. So we’re getting down into sort of the operational part of this. Let’s talk about that more in just a few minutes, because a lot of the question about this Shawn that I get and you get is, why is this happening? Always love to know the why out there. Why this is happening, a couple of things, and some of them seem very obvious, but let me just state what they are. Number one, you’re in an economy. You’re in a marketplace that measures itself in the trillions of dollars. Where there is a lot of money, the bad actors will go after it. Second, in the last decade, there’s been a tremendous amount of investment dollars put into transportation because it’s a growing economy. It’s a growing field for people to make business success for themselves, whether you’re a broker, whether you’re a carrier, whether you’re a shipper, whether you’re a technology platform. So there’s been tremendous investment into it. So there’s the bad actors. They watch where the investment money goes. And then they look for weaknesses in the automation or weaknesses in the data, weaknesses in the technology where they can attack because they can attack from a long way away and you’ll never see them coming. Shawn, talk about those three things. Then I want you to show the Freight Nation watchers and listeners the graphic on the impact that we’ve had.

Shawn – 00:09:09:

Yeah, so great points there. And part of this also, when you think about pirates, this is pirates of the expressway. We had pirates in the water, and there’s also prosecution.

Brent – 00:09:22:

Right.

Shawn – 00:09:22:

So how easily can someone who has been caught be prosecuted? So this is some of this as well. They’re looking at this, okay, we do this, and it’s handled as cargo theft. It’s a cargo claim. So trying to get local and federal prosecution, it’s challenging. There’s a lot of things. This is Truckstop, we’ve been working closely with the federal and at the local levels there. But from a technology standpoint, this is one of the things when I joined Truckstop eight years ago, is this is an industry ripe for digitalization.

Brent – 00:09:51:

Right, surely. It helps you make more money. Right.

Shawn – 00:09:56:

But, companies are slow to adopt these efficiencies. The bad actors are not. They’re out there. They’re adopting technologies. They’re adopting artificial intelligence, ways to be able to mask their identity. That’s a key thing here. As we talk about some of the indicators of this, this hiding. And they’re getting more and more sophisticated and organized around hiding themselves. And so that’s some of the things that we’re continuing to look at here. But it’s around opportunity from ease of access from a technology or process standpoint, but also access from a behavioral standpoint. People, are they watching for this? Do they have policies and protocols in place or technology in place on top of that to help protect themselves against it? So they’re looking for those unlocked doors, looking for the dark alleys, ways to be able to hide. And you may say, well, we have everything lit. But if you aren’t looking, it’s a dark alley. They can go and sneak around.

Brent – 00:10:50:

Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up because one of the things that in the beginning of this fraud thing, it was like there was a lot of pointing at the load boards and load boards have responsibility to protect their customers and the marketplace against that. And so Freight Nation, the reason I bring this up is that when you think about Truckstop as a marketplace, it’s easier for us to lock down our marketplace and protect it because we have control of all of it. But we don’t have control of your activity, Mr. Carrier or Mr. Broker or Ms. Carrier or Ms. Broker. We don’t have control on where you go outside of the network. And then what you bring into the network. And this is why I made a point, I asked Shawn to talk about this, is that in order for us to help decrease it, it’s going to take every player in the market having a cybersecurity policy and having a cybersecurity team in this to be able to get good checks and balances. So, Shawn, show the Freight Nation watchers today, the watchers will get to see this, the listeners will just have to go through the audio part of it, but show them what we’ve seen since before 2008, The Great Recession, right? So what we’ve seen from a standpoint is fraud in the marketplace because it’s really eye-opening.

Shawn – 00:11:52:

One of the things I’ll show here in the graphic is that it follows the economy a lot of what we’re seeing. And I talked about opportunities within here. And as you see here right now, 2023, you had a large spike. Tremendous. We all felt this.

Brent – 00:12:10:

Just so you know, Freight Nation, it started in October of 2022. The reason it looks low, so much lower in ‘22, is that really all that height, October ‘22 is when it started. That’s when the market had transitioned all the way back down to normal. You had the normal amount of freight in the marketplace.

Shawn – 00:12:25:

And these are reports of fraud to our assurance team that we handled and we verified. That’s one of the things that’s important to us, the reports that we handle is that our complaints team verify the complaint, verify with both parties. And so these have been verified reports of fraud, whether double brokering, stolen loads, things like that. So. Within our marketplace and you see that surge. And as you mentioned, October, there were indications because double brokering, stolen loads, it’s been around. And as you see that you’ve had them throughout the decades, but there were some indications in the fall, a couple indications. And then around the November, December timeframe, it surged. We started seeing different signals than ever before. And we immediately started jumping to make changes on our side here. But. If you look back further in this, I mentioned following the market, following the economy. The last time there was a spike, not to the levels we’re seeing now, but was in 2009. That was the last economic recession.

Brent – 00:13:35:

Yeah. That’s the Great Recession. And you brought this up. And Freight Nation, I want to make sure that I hit this again. It’s when it’s harder. It’s when we have a greater need that maybe we’re not doing as many checks and balances. Maybe we saw a great rate. And we said, I got to take it right now. And then you don’t do all the checks and balances on the vetting of the information that you normally might do. And you get stung by fraudulent activity. So you can’t get outside of human nature and things. You can try as much as you want, but human nature, you have to follow along the lines on that. So continue on, Shawn.

Shawn – 00:14:08:

Yeah. Well, and it’s a great point because you have people facing hardships, looking for ways of helping their families. And so the bad actor side as well, they’re taking advantage of that, trying to find ways of handling it. Now there’s questions I get on, well, when the economy changes, it starts to shift in the direction. Are we going to see this go down? You can see some changes, but I think bad actors, it’s like blood in the water. Sharks attacking. They’ve found how easy this is right now.

Brent – 00:14:38:

Yeah, let me address that with you real quick. Freight Nation, and Shawn, thank you for bringing that. Let me address that with Freight Nation. Because it’s my job to be out there listening to the leaders in the market, the players in the market. So I listen to the big insurance companies. I listen to technology fraud companies. I work with the Transportation Intermediaries Association, the American Trucking Association, the Truckload Carriers Association, OOIDA. I work with all of them. And let me tell you right now, because of the digital age that we live in, this fraudulent market, fraudulent activity is not going away quickly. Yes, we’re going to mitigate part of it with a continuous effort by all players in the market, but it’s not going to go away quickly. And let me tell you why. The fraud loss alone this year is between $500 and $700 million. $500 and $700 million. That’s a lot of money that didn’t go into people’s hands. And it doesn’t just affect trucking. It affects the manufacturer of the product. It affects the consumer because they don’t have the goods to buy. It affects everyone in this marketplace. Another thing, here’s another very important thing. Most people think, oh, it’s just from a couple of isolated areas. Nope. 22 different countries are attacking our marketplace. The United States is the most successful country in the world. They’re going to attack where the money is. Okay, so this is why I bring this up. This is why we’re talking about this today. This is why we’re going to talk about some of the solutions. But Shawn and I are trying to set the stage today to show you that this is not a small problem. And it’s something that we want to help you protect you, but we can’t protect your business outside of Truckstop. But we can help give you advice on how to do that. All right. So, Shawn, continue on.

Shawn – 00:16:13:

Thank you, Brent. And something else here. So we had a surge. There’s an influx of new carriers. We talk about how do we get to where we are today? Influx of new carriers that came in 2021, 2022.

Brent – 00:16:26:

Yeah. Pre-market. Everybody was making money, right? Yeah.

Shawn – 00:16:30:

And within there, you had authorities being created by bad actors. That was a tactic. Go and create new authorities out there. They would go and buy 20 authorities. They just put it out there. And so then the countermeasure was, well, I’m not going to accept a carrier that has an authority of less than six months, a year. Well, then bad actors would look. And when I talk about bad actors, there’s different things here. The double brokers and you have those who are stealing loads. And actually, a lot of these companies, based upon what you’re moving, they’re going to either re-broker it or they’re going to steal it. So that was these tactics, though. They would go and create the new authorities and then they let them age out. But still, then you start looking at, do you have inspections? It’s like, okay, now people are looking for inspections. We’ve got to make sure we’re moving, but they don’t have the trucks because they’re trying to re-broker. Well, I mentioned the surge of those trucks, the surge of the carriers that have entered the market, and they’re trying to hide amongst those. Well, a portion of those carriers haven’t survived the market. We have this downturn. It’s flooded. You have more capacity than there is freight going on, so it’s very capacity reach. Some of those are going out of business. Now they’re being purchased by bad actors out there and others networks out there and sites.

Brent – 00:17:53:

You’re talking about the purchasing of MC numbers.

Shawn – 00:17:55:

Purchasing of MC number, purchasing of the carrier. And it’s beyond that.

Brent – 00:17:59:

Oh, beyond that. Okay.

Shawn – 00:18:01:

Because before it was just purchasing the authority and people would ask, well, how do you legitimately purchase the DOT? They can get the MC. Well, these are not legitimate transfers of sale. They’re not procuring it above board. And they’re not just purchasing their authority information. They’re purchasing their identity. Because what they’re also finding is everyone’s putting security in place.

Brent – 00:18:27:

Right.

Shawn – 00:18:28:

And with accounts and everything else, well, bad actors know that they need to have all that information. They need the credentials. They need the emails. So they’re getting everything wholesale from these carriers. And by owning that information, because something else people were looking for was changes in information. That’s one of your measures. Well, if you own the identity, you don’t need to change anything. They know what we’re looking for. They know what people are using to try and protect themselves. And they’re countering that with various measures, which makes it even more important for your people who are talking, whether it’s on the carrier side, same thing on the carrier side, because they’re the ones that could be taking a load that they won’t get paid for because it was double brokered to them. Also could be if it was double brokered, sent to another location and held hostage, because that’s not the actual consignee. So both sides get impacted in these situations. And so it’s so important to have relationships with each other, talk with each other, and ultimately use your gut. Train your people. Use your gut. And there’s some things in here when I talk about the transferring of identities over there. How do you detect a bad actor hiding within the clothing of somebody else, looking for signals, looking for, is this too good of a load? Like, the price or are they asking too many questions? Not enough questions. There’s these things in there. And this is where, again, I mentioned Fraud Friday. They’re attacking you when your guard is down. I mean, you’re trying to get through something. And so right now in this climate, everyone needs to have their guard up. They need to be thinking about this and something doesn’t feel right. Take a little bit more time.

Brent – 00:20:17:

Right. Yeah. Hey, Freight Nation, I want to talk about this. And thank you, Sean, for talking about this. So if someone approaches you to buy your MC number. We understand it’s not illegal to sell it. Number one, when you sell it, you need to report it to the FMCSA. That’s part of the requirement when you do this. It doesn’t always happen. And so if somebody is just pinging you about selling your MC and you’re not even interested in selling it, you’re probably talking to a fraudulent player in the marketplace. And it’s because if they can get your identity and they’re not just going to ask to buy your MC number, they’re going to want your login information. They’re going to want your passwords. They’re going to want all this information. Then they’re going to be able to go to other places that your password might match that you use somewhere else because human beings tend to use the same passwords in locations. So there’s all kinds of problems about going on the market because these factors, to Shawn’s point, are going to do one thing. They’re going to steal your identity or they’re going to buy your identity. And then they’re going to hijack it and use it in the marketplace. It costs chaos as long as they can. And then they’ll get rid of it and disappear. And no one will see them again. So the point is, we all love this industry. We all want to make sure we’re protected in this industry. So it’s your duty out there to make sure you’re protecting as well. We understand it’s tough times out there. Just understand that it is your responsibility to make sure that you’re selling it to a legitimate person, because there are people out there that want to buy carrier authorities because it helps them in their marketplace. It helps. So no problem with that. So Shawn, you were going to say something?

Shawn – 00:21:41:

Well, one other thing you remind me of a situation that we heard about and you talk about the identity and in one particular case, the criminal. These aren’t just opportunity companies wanting to change.

Brent – 00:21:55:

It’s not petty theft. Yeah.

Shawn – 00:21:57:

So someone, a carrier, went out of business, sold their identity. That was used to get access to their bank account, make purchases. And when they were confronted, they threatened the carrier, ex-carrier in this case, and their family. They knew everything about them. So this is not a good situation and you think, hey, I hand it off. I’m done with this. I have no use for it anymore. These same entities out there, the text messages, all the scams you think of in your emails, I’m not going to fall for that. They’re attacking through other ways. You just don’t recognize it.

Brent – 00:22:36:

Yeah. So you bring up a good point. Freight Nation, this is organized crime. It may be international organized crime, but it’s organized crime coming to the United States. And so we’ve actually worked with the FBI, and they’re taking a much more serious look at what’s going on in the US, Freight theft. And so we’ve worked with the highest levels at the FBI and the regional offices to educate them on how they can help spot it and then work with the people affected to go after the bad actors and then prevent it in the future. There’s even on the Truckstop website, you can see we’ve got a nice blog post on there, the four ways you can report and protect yourself to the FBI on freight fraud. So, Shawn, great setup with the problem in the market. And what are the bad actors doing and how are they doing it? So I want to shift into solutions, because where there’s opportunity for people to build products to help protect their businesses, grow their businesses, then there’s been great things. And there’s been some really good products coming to the marketplace. And Truckstop certainly takes our responsibility very seriously. And here’s what I want to say about this, Freight Nation. Because we work in the digital age. We all work in the modern internet age. There have to be checks and balances in everything. I’ll give you my quick story that I love to use. I went and rented a U-Haul, a small pull behind that I pulled behind my truck. I was moving some of my kids from home to college. It cost me like $25 for the trailer I was renting from U-Haul. I had to do multi-factor authentication when I registered my account and had to do personal identity through my driver’s license and through everything it all had to match. So this is for a $25 purchase. So it is a reality in this world, this digital world we’re working, that technical solutions to protect you are necessary for you to operate your business. So, Shawn, let’s talk about solutions. What Truckstop has done. Because I’m very excited about what you’re going to be able to show them on the whole. How we’re continuing to bring our products to help our customers know they can trust that we’re out there to help them in their market.

Shawn – 00:24:28:

Thank you, Brent. So TSA, for anyone who’s flown, has experienced that. And on the TSA’s website, they have this great diagram around layers of security, the things that they do to help protect you, your safety, whether you’re outside the airport, going through the airport. And I love that. And so I adapted it to the things that we’re doing here at Truckstop. And there’s a variety of different elements, whether you’re within our applications or outside of our applications. And I’ll talk through these areas here. The first one, I’m talking about when they’re not within Truckstop. But I’ll go into a little more detail on this. This is an exciting space we have here with a tool called Risk Factors. I’ll hit on that. But there’s things that we’re offering, technology we’re offering, that’ll help you identify risk signals when you don’t have to be within our platform, logged into Truckstop. You can use it outside of that. In addition to the other things that we’ve already talked about on recognizing your identity, understanding that, protecting yourselves. Within Truckstop, I talked about this as well. We have a team that is providing surveillance. We have a lot of technology that’s watching for signals. This is going back decades. We have so much information. We’ve seen the bad actors coming in. Some of them continue to reuse that information. We use that as identifying signals there. When people let us know, we talk about compromise identities. And if carriers or brokers within Truckstop notify us, we’re going to take action. We actually post within Truckstop a list of compromised identities that we’ve been informed on. We let people know about that. We’ve kicked out hundreds of bad actors off the load board. When we get made aware of a situation, we’re going to look over on RMIS, which is our risk management onboarding platform. We’re going to be notifying participants there. So there’s this whole program of folks.

Brent – 00:26:20:

Yeah, Shawn, I saw some data the other day from Truckstop that we’ve either kicked out or refused business or blocked over 7,000 bad actors in the marketplace. Now, some of these are repeated because they’ll pretend to be one person and then they’ll get blocked and they’ll come in as another person. And we can recognize them really fast, but over 7,000 times. And so that’s a number to show you that you have to be vigilant about continuing to stay after it.

Shawn – 00:26:43:

Yeah, those chameleons, they keep trying to change, but we have ways of being able to detect them. So we have a lot of those provisions. That’s just continuous monitoring we have within there. As I mentioned, when there is a new situation that we couldn’t quite figure out, that’s where I get involved and others get involved trying to understand how it happens? What can we do? So in addition to closing off what happened, then adapting our technologies and tools as well for future identification of that. Back to that, you brought up when you got the U-Haul and you think about the TSA. When they’re entering within the system, we talk about onboarding within RMIS. We’re using an identity provider and we need to check your ID. We need to make sure that you are who you say you are when you’re coming in. And so we have provisions in place verifying that you are this person as a human coming in. And then it gets down to the business layer. Risk screening, this is an area we’re continuing to evolve and grow. And you think about, okay, I go through TSA, I check my ID, and then I go through the x-ray. And that’s an area we are heavily invested in, in finding those signals, the bombs in the briefcase coming through and trying to find them within our system. We get further in here from a brokerage standpoint, you own your risk, you manage your risk. We want you to be able to set your risk standards, your thresholds as you see fit. And so we are helping you protect your network on who’s coming in there. We have elements who can onboard with you, who can’t onboard based on various risk protocols and policies. And then the continuous monitoring of your network, keeping that data up to date. It’s all these layers that are happening at all the different touch points that we’re providing across our systems and then providing you abilities to override when necessary. We’re adding many elements of security across the system, automating that and adding additional protocols across our application. We have security elements within our marketplace, working across our ecosystem to bring it all together. With that security, we have all the data and information. This is where we’re taking into risk factors.

Brent – 00:28:58:

Yeah. I want to say, before you shift to the new data piece on risk factors. So you’ve got this nice road coming down the middle on the right-hand side, you’ve got outside the Truckstop marketplace and how they can be projected. Then you’ve got on the left-hand side, you’ve got the inside when you’re inside the network. And so you talked about those three points on which each one of them have multiple pieces on them. And so why is it that we at Truckstop are so concerned about not just the inside when someone’s inside of our network, when someone’s outside of our network? Tell the Truckstop, I mean, the Freight Nation watchers and listeners, why is that so important?

Shawn – 00:29:30:

It’s critical for you to have visibility and confidence around who you’re operating with. Our goal is to help you operate with clear eyes and as much information as possible. And we talk about tactics of the bad actors they’re fighting. And so we’re trying to remove some of the facade so you can be able to see that and provide you clarity around who these people are, because really, it’s all about relationships. That’s the critical piece. And these criminals out there are impacting your ability to trust anybody. And it impacts the carriers as well. You put all these controls in place and the carriers can’t operate effectively. So bringing these things together, streamline the process. And we talk about right now where it’s capacity rich. Companies are willing to take a little bit more time. Eventually, it can become capacity constrained. We need to make sure that we’re helping companies build the muscle to be able to operate with confidence, layering in the technology with your policies, with the training of your people as well. So when the market shifts, you can operate with the speed you need because you’re going to have to make decisions faster. How do you do it not recklessly? So enabling folks through these various protocols, having more confidence around who these individuals are and enabling both parties. We can provide clarity around who is operating within there and then continuously evolving the system, working to get ahead of the bad actors.

Brent – 00:30:53:

Fantastic. So Freight Nation, Truckstop takes our responsibility seriously. We’re going to do everything we can do to build the critical tools with the proper data and information to protect you within our system. And then we also, because we believe in independence and giving you control, making sure you’ve got control of your business, we’re going to enable you with as much data as we can outside of the network so you can protect yourself outside of the network. We’re going to do our responsibility and we’re going to do our best to enable you to do your responsibility. All right. So we’ve got about nine or 10 minutes left. So I want you to talk about risk factors. And then we’re going to talk about some future state because this thing’s not going away anytime soon. Shawn, let’s talk about layers of trust. Now we built another product because we want to make sure we’re leveraging data to everyone’s best use possible.

Shawn – 00:31:39:

So as I was talking before about risk factors, we’re really excited about this. The great thing with risk factors is it taps into the vast amount of data that we have across our Truckstop ecosystem. And they combine that with our data science team here at Truckstop. We use it to identify various things. Indicators or signals for potential risky information. And so what we’re showing here, this is an example of the side panel you see over here, and you can have risk factors installed in two different ways. You can have it as an Outlook plugin, and when it is an Outlook plugin, when you bring up an email, it is going to look at that email and bring a panel up based upon the information using DOT, the MC, phone numbers, or email. And it’s going to show you the carrier on the side. You can also have this as a browser extension within Chrome that you can right-click on a website, MC your information, or you can type in that information. Again, MC, DOT, phone number, email. And so in this particular case, there’s some different indicators that we’re looking at. There’s an overall risk. So we’re running this through AI-backed algorithms based on information that our security team, I mentioned before, we have this marketplace security team. We have years of information around potential indicators for suspicious information or bad actors. So we’re looking at the equipment they’re running, specifically the VINs that are associated with them, and identifying, are these VINs also appearing on other inspections or other information with different carriers? It does not mean that they’re bad. It just means that additional screening is recommended. Same thing with contact information, phone numbers they’re using, emails they’re using. Are they going through a dispatch service? It’s giving you this additional information that you can use to have a conversation with that carrier. It’s important for you to understand this information and who they are so that you have confidence in moving that freight for you. Digital risk is looking at behaviors, information around where they’re accessing from, how are they accessing, things like that.

Brent – 00:33:51:

What websites they’re coming in through, platforms they may be using, those sorts of things, or even what country they might be coming in.

Shawn – 00:33:57:

It’s more, it’s the location they’re coming through. So are they accessing from an unexpected location? Because we’re looking at it, I mentioned we have all this information. We also have all this historical information. We have information of where they came from in the past. Are we expecting them to come from California if they’re primarily running over on the East Coast? We’re also looking at the method. Are they coming in through a VPN? And there’s additional things we’re going to be adding in.

Brent – 00:34:21:

All right, so make sure you find what a VPN is.

Shawn – 00:34:23:

Yeah, so many of us use this at our offices. It virtualizes how you access. And this is one of the things.

Brent – 00:34:31:

So a VPN is a virtual private network, right?

Shawn – 00:34:33:

Yeah, it virtualizes where you’re coming from. And the reason why that’s important, again, does not mean it’s a bad actor immediately. It’s just that it’s untraceable. And bad actors are using that as a way to be able to spoof where they’re located. They are coming in and they are posing as a carrier operating in Minnesota. And so you’re going to be looking at, oh, are they connecting through Minnesota? Yes, they are. But it’s a virtual connection. Same thing with phone numbers. This is why we will identify if they’re coming through a non-fixed voiceover IP, which is called a virtual phone, Google Voice, things like that. They’re not traceable. Bad actors like to use non-traceable mechanisms if you can’t tell where they are. And they will use that to pose as a legitimate carrier in a legitimate location. So anyway, we use these signals just to be able to elevate the potential risk with this carrier. We also, so I’m showing this from a broker’s point of view, looking at a carrier. We’re working on making this available for carriers to view brokers. Because what the same thing, is this a double broker posing as a legitimate company trying to issue you freight? So this is information we’re bringing this in. We’re continuing to enhance this. And some of the things we’re also doing is that we look at these, the new trends, new things that are happening. They’re wanting to hide and they’re wanting to pose as legitimate carriers. I talked about carriers going out of business, selling their authorities, selling their identity. Well, bad actors, they’re wanting to basically wear the clothing of this other carrier, hide within that so they can steal your load. Part of that is looking for additional signals and suspicious changes in behavior, lapses in activity across our systems, and then all signaling a dramatic change. These are what I call zombies.

Brent – 00:36:27:

The zombies. Wait a minute, like the day of the dead zombies or a different type of zombie?

Shawn – 00:36:31:

If you look at the information, there are no signals of life. There’s no behaviors, no searching activity, other things happening. And then all of a sudden it comes back to life. And what we see is bad actors when they strike with tenacity. They go fast. Listen to your lumbering zombie. This is your kind of World War Z. They strike, they go fast.

Brent – 00:36:53:

It’s very quick. Yeah. Because they know they’re going to be found out eventually. So they want to get all they can very quickly because as soon as they find out, they’re going to shut it down and go use something else, right?

Shawn – 00:37:02:

Yep. And so these are things that we’re right now actively looking through all the information that we have to be able to identify those actors. And there’s other things out there. Some things for people to be aware of to help protect themselves. I mentioned this earlier. It’s something that looks too good. I call these the anglers out there. They’re baiting people to make a decision. You think about the lantern fish. They’re hiding in the dark and they have this glowing light that attracts people. So in this particular case, whether you’re a carrier or broker, if the rate looks too good or something. Or if they’re overly aggressive and trying to make you make a decision quickly. And I talked about fraud Friday. If it’s before a holiday or something like that. Have the spidey sense, something doesn’t seem right. Take a little bit more time. A few minutes. Do some additional vetting on who they are and say, hey, let me call you back. It’s okay. It’s better than losing that load or taking a load and not getting paid for it. So there’s all these tactics and ways are coming in. It’s important to have heightened judgment around what’s going on. Talk to the community, learn from each other. And we’re looking to bring these things in. And some other things within this system are just helping bring in community intelligence into risk factors as well. So you can have that learn from each other.

Brent – 00:38:19:

Right. So Shawn, we’re always working on a Truckstop. We’re taking Freight Nation. We’re taking the power of a scaled company who’s been in the market almost 30 years and all the data that we can get our hands on from extreme depths of data. And we’re putting that all together in a system where you are used to yourself and have access to all the indicators on whether or not this is a legitimate transaction or an illegitimate transaction. So we’re leveraging all that for you in one product called Risk Factors. Shawn, that’s exciting, man. Anything else on risk factors that you think is beneficial?

Shawn – 00:38:52:

I talked about these high level risks here. What risk factors also give you is a full narrative around what’s behind these risks. It’s not just, okay, high asset risk, medium digital risk. We have a full narrative around what we see to give you more information. What is part of this risk? So you can go and view that. Is this really a concern for you or not? Or help you in having that conversation with that carrier or eventually with the broker. We bring all that information to the forefront because I talked about our security team. The data science team, we create these tools. We first are providing that data to our security teams. They’re using this. And part of that process is to help our own teams be able to protect and secure the marketplace that’s out there, creating the most trusted network. But also to find what could be false flags. Because again, we don’t want to create noise for your teams. We want to provide you with the right level of guardrails that you can use in combination with your business rules. And then we build that into this solution that is available to your teams. But we take this incredibly seriously at Truckstop. We want you to be able to operate effectively, confidently, and quickly. Whether you’re an owner or operator out there, we want you to be able to get home and be able to run your business, be with your family. And if you’re a brokerage, being able to support your business, support your employer and support your customer, the shipper. And it’s all about bringing these things together, having confidence in your relationships, being able to focus on your relationships. So all the bad actors are hiding out there amongst the legitimate companies. We are working hard to expose them and provide you with the tools necessary to do that quickly so you can move to the legitimate companies.

Brent – 00:40:33:

Yeah, fantastic, man. That’s fantastic. So Freight Nation, you can see why at Truckstop we take a very methodical approach. We have a tremendous amount of information we gather on the front end for you to even become a part of the Truckstop Network. And then when you’re in there, there’s things like multi-factor authentication. That’s a level of security, a level of protection. You’ve got identity, you’ve got identification. And then we go all the way down into leveraging all the data that we have access to and giving it to you where you can help make these very sound, secure decisions for yourself. Because it’s all about your protection in the end so you can run your business. We want to put that into your hands. All right, Shawn, fantastic stuff. You brought us all the way through this, talking about the reason in the beginning. We talked about what’s going on in the marketplace, why it’s happening, the products in the marketplace that Truckstop can help with. Now let’s talk a little bit, just for a couple of minutes, and then we’ll wrap this great podcast up. What are some of the things coming down the road? And here’s why we talk about this, Freight Nation, is that, first off, the bad actors aren’t going to give up. They’re going to keep trying, and we’re going to keep doing everything we can to defeat them. And so you’ve got to continue to what’s known in technology as iteration. Iteration just means you’re constantly improving it all the time. Shawn, hit a couple of things, and then we’ll wrap it up.

Shawn – 00:41:44:

Yeah. Thank you, Brent. So I’ve already touched on how we’re working with the data science team, continuing to be evaluating new trends, new tactics, baking that into the process. So I already touched on that. But this risk factors, I mentioned how this is a tool that you can use today and with your teams and with yourself. We’re also going to be using this not just with our security team, but as part of our security processes, baking this into screening that we have in our system. You mentioned how we have the identity, the multi-factor. We’re going further. We’re using risk factors as part of the backbone of entity analysis. So who are you? Do you have access to this company? Are there any risks around this company on their ability to come in? So there are things we’re working on using the technology that we are making available to you for ourselves as well.

Brent – 00:42:34:

Freight Nation when Sean says entity, he means a business, an individual business. An entity is just one individual business. So just keep going, Shawn.

Shawn – 00:42:41:

Well, it’s one more. So part of this is also working on making this information available to you for your systems. So a lot of this, we look at the risk factors and things at the end user level. But you may be operating through a third party application, a transportation management system. When there are events, pushing that information immediately to your application. So if your people are working in that third party system, they’re informed when we’re made aware of situations. We have event-driven communication directly to those applications. So then the key thing here is I mentioned the very beginning. Fraud happens at multiple touch points. This wherever your people are. So it’s critical for us or providing solutions that we’re providing solutions to your people where your people operate. That’s why we have the extension. We have the Outlook plugin, but we also want to make sure we’re pushing information directly to your applications. We’re also making it available within our applications. If you happen to be using our systems. So we want your teams to be protected, have confidence, and be able to operate effectively and quickly.

Brent – 00:43:50:

Wow. Fantastic stuff. Alright, Freight Nation. This is why we have a Shawn Rasmor because as you can tell by just going through this thing, it’s complicated. It’s layered. When you have bad actors out there continuing to morph and become somebody else, and then they run into the dark. Someone has got to shine the light on them. And that’s what Truckstop’s here for. We’ve been doing this since 1995, helping carriers, helping brokers and helping shippers run this freight marketplace. So you can create a successful business. And so American can get what they need with their freight every single day. Shawn, thanks a lot for being on Freight Nation today. And thanks a lot for everything you do for Truckstop and protecting carriers and brokers and shippers.

Shawn – 00:44:29:

Thank you.

Brent – 00:44:30:

So welcome. Alright, Freight Nation. That’s a wrap. What a fun episode. I certainly hope you follow it all the way through the end and then go back and forth. Study this. Take the time to prepare yourself. It is your business. It’s in your hands and it’s up to you to make it successful. We just want to be here to help you no matter what. So thanks again for being on Freight Nation. Did you have one other thing, Shawn? Let’s see.

Shawn – 00:44:51:

I just want to reiterate. This requires everybody to be extra vigilant. Make sure everybody in your company, or if you are a company of one, educate yourself. Be on top of this. Always be thinking. And technology providers and the people, everyone, people, processes, technology, all the pieces together. We’re all in this. We are here to help you. And we just need to keep working and keep the roads moving. So thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate this.

Brent – 00:45:22:

You’re welcome. See what I mean? Freight Nation, he’s like the honey badger, man. He doesn’t give up. He’s going to keep fighting for you no matter what. Shawn’s the best. Well, Freight Nation, thanks a lot for being a part. And thanks for watching and listening today. And we’ll catch you on the next one. And don’t forget, as we like to say, Freight Nation, don’t forget to work hard, to be kind, and stay humble. We’ll catch you the next time, Freight Nation. On behalf of the Truckstop team, thanks for listening to this episode of Freight Nation. To find out more about the show, head to truckstop.com/podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes. Until then, keep on trucking and exploring the open roads with Freight Nation:

A Trucking Podcast.