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, well, welcome back, Freight Nation. Man, I’m so glad you’re joining me today because we’re going to talk about a topic that is just a headache for everybody in the industry. And hopefully today you’re going to take away some great advice and operational things you can do to help you with one of the biggest problems that hit our industry starting in about October of 2022. And it continues to be a big problem. And what we’re going to talk about today is fraud. We’re going to talk about ways in which you can protect and insulate your company and work towards defeating, mitigating against those things. Thank you for joining us today. I appreciate that. I know you have a lot of things you can do with your time. And the fact that you would give it to us today to watch on something that could potentially help your business, we’re proud of that at Truckstop and we’re proud to put this podcast out. Doing these episodes and hearing the stories and different things that can help your business because that’s the heart of Truckstop. The heart of Truckstop is for us to help you in your business. As a matter of fact, it’s in our mission statement. We want to help every business succeed in transportation. So with that in mind, we’re going to kick it off today because today is like, I like to call it like a getting better, a sharpening the saw. How can you and your business get better at the things that help you fundamentally run your business? And so today we’re going to talk about, like I said, fraud, but joining me today are the two experts at Truckstop that really helped move us down the road when we talk about how are we helping our customers, those brokers and the carriers and even the shippers work towards defeating something that really, honestly, we all would prefer to never have to deal with. And I mean, like never have to deal with, which is somebody trying to steal what you’ve worked hard to get. So today, joining me on Freight Nation is our VP of Product for Compliance and Risk, Ms. Lisa Habenstock. Lisa, thanks for joining me today.
Lisa – 00:02:11:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Brent – 00:02:12:
Yeah, Lisa’s always fun, man. When I get to go places with Lisa, I always learn a lot. She’s like a ninja when it comes to like talking about things. So she’s lots of fun. I’ve enjoyed my relationship with her. And also joining me today is one of my favorite people at Truxtime, Mr. Joel Freight who is the director of APIs and data products for Truxtime. So, Joel, thank you so much for joining us today.
Joel – 00:02:31:
Thank you, Brent.
Brent – 00:02:32:
Yeah, man. So, Freight Nation, these are two of my favorite people to talk to because I always feel like I get better at understanding what we’re doing on the technology end with Truxtime. And so we’re going to talk about fraud and we’re going to talk about how technology, but not just technology, how data can help you and how you can operationalize those within your platform. And this is super important because we live in a digital world. We live in a world that is fast and is becoming more automated. And boy, in the last decade, freight has certainly become so much more automated. And this is where these bad actors, criminals, have come in because they see this opportunity in this marketplace. And so if you don’t know this, Freight Nation, the reason that these bad actors and criminals and organized crime are coming in is because we’re in a world where we’re going to be able to do a lot of things. We’re in a trillion dollar industry. We’re in an industry that needs cybersecurity. We’ll talk a little bit about that. That needs these products that can help manage the data flows as fast as they go so you can be protected in your business and do what you love to do, which is to move freight and enjoy it and benefit your families. All right. So let’s kick this thing off. All right. So Lisa and Joel, there’s been so much going on in our industry about this evolution of fraud. Like it’s always been there. But man, for some reason, like in 2022, and we know what those reasons are, but for some reason, 2022. Just what ballistic. It went crazy. So let’s talk a little bit about freight in the industry and then talk about maybe some tactics on this. And Lisa, since you had this whole thing up for us, I’d love you to kick it off on addressing that, just the landscape of what’s going on with fraud in our industry.
Lisa – 00:03:54:
Yeah, of course. So I think the point that you hit on is the one that I really like to drive home, which is we definitely have seen a trend above and beyond sort of anything historical since 2022. But what I find is a lot of people talk about fraud is a new thing in freight. It’s a brand new trend. And the fact is, it’s actually not new. So Truckstop has actually been tracking reported incidents from our entire customer base of fraud, double brokering, theft, since we started nearly 30 years ago. And so we can see that it has always been a part of the industry, something that brokerages and carriers have had to protect their businesses against. But what we can see is that influxes of fraud are not so much correlated with freight trends, which might run every 18 to 24 months, but they’re actually correlated with economic trends. So the last time we saw a really significant influx of fraud was in around 2009. It’s the last time we had some kind of big economic impact. And so you can see it puttering along the bottom and then you see a little blip in 2009 and then puttering along the bottom through 2019 big booms of transportation and freight. And then what we have seen since 2022 is really astronomical from anything that we had seen historically. And there are a couple of different things that have all happened at once. So certainly we are coming off of the freight boom post-pandemic, unprecedented levels of freight and carriers on the road that we have ever seen before. The second thing is technological advancements since 2009. So all brokerages are using more tech, carriers are using more tech, bad actors are using more tech. Everyone has gotten more sophisticated in how they’re actually doing their business, whether it’s good business or not so good business. And then the third thing is really that both brokerages and carriers were not built for the most part as tech first businesses. And so it means that they are evolving how they think about running their businesses on tech. Especially carriers tend to not be the most technologically savvy user. They haven’t had a lot of that tech education. So they are two different parties that are particularly vulnerable to bad actors coming in and taking advantage of the systems or lack thereof that they have put in place to actually protect their business. So it’s a little bit of a sort of perfect storm of things that have all happened at once that make it a particularly appealing landscape, not just because of the size of the industry that you said, but because of the internal dynamics within it as well. That over the past couple of years, we’ve seen bad actors really start to target it.
Brent – 00:06:39:
Yeah, yeah. Great comments. I think of a couple of things there. One of the things where Truckstop immediately spun up when we became a business in 1995 is our assurance department, which helps solve problems like this. And boy, have we seen the increase in the problems coming across the board to that department on, hi, can you help me? I’ve had a free payment stolen, or I had a piece of cargo stolen, or all my cargo stolen. So can Truckstop help me with that? I think about that. And then I just think about like what you said about not built as a tech business. We had an industry in the last decade that has been automating really fast, but we haven’t put the guide rails in from a cyber standpoint, like everybody protecting their environment. It’s like we forgot to put a lock on the front door a little bit. So let’s talk about fraud’s impact in the industry. And Joel, jump in there if you see anything that you want to add to it. Like just set the foundation on the impact it’s had on our market, Lisa.
Lisa – 00:07:29:
Yeah. So one of the things that makes freight unique is that we are susceptible to both cyber attacks where they may be coming in and trying to get access to accounts or financial information or ability to book loads, whatever it is. But they are also going after the physical assets. And so it’s a fight that has to be fought on both sides. And so I think maybe we have had some level of understanding of actual freight theft from previous years when, you know, the levels weren’t as high. But now they’re really attacking from multiple vectors and that they’re I joke that like Netflix has to worry about maybe people coming in and stealing account information. But they’re not really worried about bad actors coming in and trying to steal the latest season of Love is Blind. But brokerages have to really fight the battle on both sides. And so it is making sure that they are choosing. It’s sophisticated vendors that have a good cybersecurity infrastructure, making sure that they do the right level of education with their employees. That’s actually the number one thing that we see getting overlooked. And it creates the biggest area of susceptibility to a brokerage for someone to come in and get a phishing attempt or something like that that really exposes their entire system. And then the same really goes with carriers. So, again, carriers create vulnerabilities for a brokerage as well. And brokers are the best person to help carriers understand how to recognize a bill of lading from my brokerage. Here’s the domain that you should always expect to see to know that it’s my brokerage. Here’s what secure communications look like. And then really educating a carrier so that you’re protecting both party. So it has a lot of sort of technological implications, but also operational implications. And then that doesn’t even get us to the part of where it ties into the shipper. A really engaging your shipper. And making sure that your shipper is actually giving the freight to the carrier that you’ve booked the load with to make sure that it gets from one place to the next.
Brent – 00:09:28:
Yeah, no doubt. I think about this industry is so relationally oriented. Everyone’s like, everybody knows each other. Yeah, we can have this trusted environment. What do we need with all these security measures? Well, that was fine back in 95 and 2000, maybe right after deregulation in 1980. But in today’s modern market, which is a technologically automated marketplace, and look, that doesn’t remove the relationship. It just means things move faster, a lot faster. And the idea that you need good cybersecurity is something that is this. It’s not just a second thought or a third thought. It’s a first thought in today’s world. If you’re going to operate inside a freight.
Lisa – 00:10:04:
I think that this absolutely is a relationship business. And I think that relationships can be our biggest asset at the end of the day. And so something that we talk a lot about is less about how do you build a business where you’re identifying fraud and you’re identifying bad actors and you’re identifying risk first, and instead think about it as how do we build trust at different gates along the way? And the relationship is a really big piece of that. So if you’re starting from the place of a very strong relationship, you know what lanes that carrier drives, you know that that carrier’s family is named, all of these things, you have that in your databases, you can actually continue to reinforce trust throughout those engagements to say, I’m still talking to the person that I say they are, and then really reinforce with a layer of technology on top of it to help you move as quickly as possible and help check points where there is room for human error. And social engineering, that is a flawed system. And that’s where I think relationships and technology can really go hand in hand and create a very symbiotic situation.
Brent – 00:11:12:
Well, 100% agree on that one, man. They need to be symbiotic. So thank you for bringing that out. All right. So let’s talk about like the front lines. Lisa, you get to work with the teams. You lead the teams. You get to hear from all of the heartbreak on the things that are going on and where the industry is being attacked. And you even speak in the marketplace. Recently, you got to speak at F3 in Chattanooga, which was super fun. So let’s talk about the front lines. I know at Truckstop, and this is something that we’ve talked about just in the last time frame, we’ve got almost 10,000, 8,000 to 10,000 people just trying to get into our system that we said there’s either a wrong piece of data or there’s something else going on where we’ve denied access. And so talk a little bit about what’s going on the front lines there.
Lisa – 00:11:52:
Yeah, so we’re fortunate to sit in a position where we can not only see the activity that’s happening within the TruckStop ecosystem, but we also get a lot of information from our customers about what they’re experiencing, bad actors that they have been vulnerable to with an attack or stolen loads. And we can understand what that looks like and help take that information and then perpetuate it across our system so that everyone gets to become a little bit more secure. Something that we’ve been doing over the past couple of months is really looking at those behavioral trends and creating personas on top of them. And I think that for us, what it really helps is the persona helps us think about humanizing what these bad actors are doing. And because they really are behavioral trends, we can understand, oh, this is actually the character that is perpetuating this issue. And so some key examples of that are the one that we talked about. A lot these days we refer to as a chameleon carrier that’s been in the market for a long time. But what we see as a pattern is a company will shut down to reemerge under a different name or a location, or maybe a carrier will sell their NC to a bad actor who’s coming in and taking over that account. And so things that we might pay attention to identify a chameleon would be reused contact information, reused VINs, something where we can see that there’s maybe someone like pretending to be that carrier when they’re not actually. One that’s a little bit more straightforward is a bandit where they’re really after straight up theft, right? So they’re posing as a real carrier. Their contact information is compromised. They’ve gotten access to their email address, something like that. And they are just trying to get assigned a load to go and take that load somewhere. And so we might look at things like a recent contact change, multiple reasons to delay a pickup, right? Just to make sure that they can actually get their truck where they need it to be and go and take it somewhere else. Or maybe different VPNs that look suspicious have been reused from places that we wouldn’t expect. The third is an angler. So this is where we really see social engineering come into play. So where I talk about building gates of trust, they’re trying to trick someone to give them a load. And they might be taking advantage of a Friday afternoon where they know that brokers are really eager to try and get things closed. So they might come in and say that they’ll take a load at well below market rate. And then the last one is really the one that we’ve been talking the most about over the past couple of months is zombies, where a carrier will close their MC, give all of their information to a bad actor who basically comes in. The biggest indicator that we can see for this profile is a real flurry of onboarding activity where that carrier previously was. So we can tell that something has happened. There’s a dynamic that’s changed. And that should be an indicator that a broker should be doing additional diligence before working with that carrier.
Joel – 00:14:54:
Yeah, and all these things, there’s this element of time, right? Sometimes the fraud is a slow burn, sometimes it’s a spike, and it’s like, okay, there’s this real flurry of activity. And what we see is this idea of time coming into play with the fraud. Yeah, there’s that kind of historical data that we’ve seen around contact changes or inspection data, but we know that inspection data is delayed from the FMCSA, right? And so you need to be aware of, hey, the time that it takes to perpetuate a fraud can be very short, depending on the kind of fraud that you are seeing, and then it can also last for a very short period of time. It could be the bandit who’s after one load, they’re done. As soon as they have that one load, they’ve moved on to another fraud target. So being aware of time is really important, and that’s what we’re starting to see is it’s not just the traditional vectors. It’s not just the traditional timeframe. It’s not just fraud Fridays. You can see this happen at any time.
Brent – 00:15:49:
Great comment, Joel. So, all right, Freight Nation, why are we talking about these things in such detail? Well, because these bad actors, they have certain behavior tactics, and so we want to help defeat that tactic as they come in. But here’s the thing, they morph and they change. So just take it this way. Freight Nation, whether you’re a carrier or whether you’re a broker or whether you’re a shipper doing business with us, just remember this. There’s not a single bad actor that has your best interest in mind. So if you’re a carrier, and I know that times are tough and they’ve been hard, selling your MC without extreme validation and reporting it to the FMCSA is never a good idea. You may receive five, $10,000 for it. I promise you their goal with that is to hurt, is to take from somebody else and to potentially hurt your character and reputation in the marketplace. So just remember, there’s no bad actor that has, or I know that we’re being kind saying bad actors, really it’s organized crime and criminals. They do not have your best interests in mind. And so we talk really in depth about these things because we want to help you understand how to position your business. To be able react to them by using technology like ours and others. So Lisa brought up the point about really making sure that your technology is well positioned and well vetted, whether it’s Truckstop or whether it’s somebody else. We encourage you just to make sure that they have extremely good services around them that can help you because it’s going to take everybody in order to solve this. So fantastic point, Lisa and Joel. All right, Joel, let’s jump to you. The tech guy, the builder guy, the product guy. Okay. So Lisa’s on the management end. You’re on the, I’m getting it done end. Okay. So I’m building these things. All right. So we’re in a data world. We live in a data world since the internet became a thing in 1995, by the way, that’s the year Truckstop came out. Just coincidence. But data became a thing and whether you’re a carrier, whether you’re a broker, whether you’re a shipper, there’s a data, a huge data element to your business. So let’s talk about real-time data. Let’s talk about the aspect of that, Joel. And so Freight Nation, you heard from Lisa on the first part of this. And so we’re going to talk to Joel about this and Lisa’s going to jump in with some color. So how does real-time data help Joel from a standpoint of protecting against fraudsters who offer and operate? And you mentioned this just a second ago, but speed and precision, because by the way, they’re very good at what they do. And they get paid when they weren’t able to take something from somebody else. So how’s that play a role in this?
Joel – 00:18:04:
Yeah. So when we’re looking at real-time data, there’s the two kinds of data. And I did mention this before. You’ve got the real-time data, which is what you could call digital exhaust, right? It’s the activity that’s happening, whether over the road with ELDs, whether you’re on a platform like Truckstop, it’s digital activity. And you can try to obfuscate it if you want using VPNs, but even that can be some sort of indicator of, hey, somebody is trying to be something that they are not. You have this digital data, and then you have these kind of lagging indicators around contact changes, which you can get those relatively quickly, but it’s a different kind of risk. The real-time data gives us the ability to quickly surface patterns that we previously couldn’t see. And we couldn’t see them for a couple of reasons. One, because we didn’t have visibility into them because we weren’t tracking, logging the data, but also because the data is often proprietary, right? Like this is happening within a TruckStop ecosystem. It’s happening within an ELD or an ELD aggregator, right? All this data is siloed. And in order to be able to pull it together, you had to have the framework to be able to do that. And that was really difficult. As we start to see data become more available and this real-time data become more available, we’re able to more quickly surface the patterns. And when we can quickly surface the patterns, then we’re able to quickly observe the patterns. We can see it, couldn’t see it before. We can start to analyze it, and then we can start to make it available to brokers, to carriers, to people know, hey, this kind of thing has happened. So the digital and the real-time data is very important for being able to communicate things which previously could not be communicated. And I think we’re still just scratching the surface about how we can analyze this data and how we can move from the sort of descriptive analytics to prescriptive analytics to get ahead of those bad actors who they might be taking one action, and we know what kind of action they would take next, where we can start to say, hey, you might want to… Be aware of someone associated with this carrier because we’re starting to see a pattern that doesn’t end well.
Brent – 00:20:08:
Yeah, fantastic. So, all right, Freight Nation. So when Joel talks about prescriptive and descriptive, what you want in your data is data that you can utilize from a fraud standpoint. You want data that can help you make a decision before the bad thing happens, not after. Lagging data is data that’s beneficial to you after something happened, but then you got to figure out, okay, how do I keep it from happening again? So super important. So Joel, I want to jump into this. Because look, we’re not here to promote a product, but we’ve done stuff at Truckstyle. We’re a giant platform. I mean, we’re a giant platform and we have the largest database of carriers, ofcorecarrier in the marketplace with our RMS products. So we have a responsibility to the marketplace to talk about how do you productize that data? We released a product a few months ago and we just did a big advancement on it called Risk Factors and Risk Factors Advanced. And so that’s a really nice product from a standpoint, but what’s important, Joel, to productize in that data so someone can actually action on their platform?
Joel – 00:20:59:
So, I mean, if we could be… To be totally transparent. Truckstop didn’t do a good job of creating like a single pane of glass. We had data that sat within all of these systems and we didn’t do a good job bringing it together. I think we can all acknowledge that. What we have tried to do and started to do is build a framework that all that data can start to be brought together. And then we can start to run some data analysis on it. We’ve had the assurance team and there’s, I think, in aggregate, I think we say there’s hundreds of years of experience across all the members of that team. And that’s entirely true. But all of that experience is not useful if you don’t have data, whether it’s real time or otherwise, to be able to say, hey, all this data in one place, we can start to observe and start to say, hey, this actor’s bad, this actor’s not bad. So that was the first thing that we had to do. And then the second thing we had to do was start to say, all right, well, how do we build something that is useful? I don’t want this to be a sort of sales pitch, but what I want to acknowledge here is to say we wanted to build something that worked within a workflow. And it’s not about saying, hey, you have to go to some other screen because what’s the point? Like, we just talked about data existing in all of these places. We’re just creating a new place for siloed data to exist. What we want to do is build something that works within existing workflows to say, okay, now you start to see the value of this data because you have it at the time that you need it. And so it’s not enough to have real-time data. If I have to log into another system, that’s problematic, right? We want to bring the data upstream to make it as useful as possible.
Lisa – 00:22:26:
But I’ll just add one thing that I think that, Brent, that I came from the customer side of things and customer success and customer support was checked out before moving over to product. I think that the challenges that a brokerage in particular is going to have, to Joel’s point, is they likely have proprietary data, their own proprietary data. And they might have some other aggregated data. But I think that when we think about the challenges that a brokerage has to be able to get data at scale is, one, accessing the data. Two, the expertise to do the kind of framework building that Joel is talking about. And three, the time to actually invest the appropriate resources to turn that into usable data to build into their system. And I think that it’s a very limited number of brokerages that would potentially have all three of those things. And so when we really think about how we have an opportunity to serve the market and really delivering on what you talk about as our responsibility, given where we sit in a position where we have our proprietary data, we have network data, we have industry data, we have the expertise, and we are making the investment to actually build up the framework that Joel is talking about. And so I think that those things are all really aligned. Those are resources and skill sets and data access that the vast majority of brokerages wouldn’t be able to get to otherwise.
Brent – 00:23:56:
No doubt. And I often say this, we work in an industry and it’s true about life just in general, but time is money. So you’ve got to be able to work quickly. And that filter used to be just finding the right carrier for that load. Now it’s vetting all the information on the top end before you find that right carrier to put on that load. And so I appreciate Joel talking about workflow because workflow for a broker and carriers and fragmentation carriers, if you’re listening out there and watching this, workflow is king to a broker because they’ve got to get that information processed all the way through to get to you, to be able to help you find that load that you can move for them. So super important. So thank you for those two comments. All right. So let’s talk about product innovation to combat this organized crime and these bad actors, Joel. So let’s talk about what’s Truckstop doing on a product innovation standpoint and what should maybe the industry be doing on just continuing to innovate?
Joel – 00:24:45:
That’s a great question, Brent. What we’re starting to see is that the bad actors are becoming more sophisticated, right? We’re seeing technological trends, particularly around Gen AI which makes it much more efficient to do the things that the bad actors want to accomplish. So before where they had to build a website, it would take the time that it takes to build a website. Now I can go to ChatGPT, create a website within a matter of minutes and have it published. And so when you think about what do we need to do, it’s not about, okay, hey, I need to go after AI for the sake of AI, or I need to embrace technology for the sake of technology. It’s almost like… Yeah. I don’t buy a new tool. Let’s say I want to buy a miter saw and all I have is a handsaw. I don’t buy a new tool and expect to have a better house. I buy a new tool to help me get better at building houses. I had a grandfather who, he was a carpenter. He built his own house. He built a number of houses around town, but was a landlord, did all of his own property management. He worked very hard around the fine carpentry work. And he went from a coping saw to a handsaw, then had a miter saw. Still took the time that it took to deliver something that was like really fine craftsmanship to the point where he had Parkinson’s much later in life. And whether it was laying a bead of caulk or cutting using a coping saw to finish up some floor trim, he could still do it. Even with the Parkinson’s, he’d go down and then just lay that bead of caulk like a pro, the pro that he was. And it’s not about the tool for the sake of a tool or for the sake of having something better. It’s about, it can make me better at what I’m trying to accomplish. And what we’re trying to do here and with the innovations that we’re trying to do and that we’re encouraging both the brokers and the carriers to embrace, it’s about these sort of new ways of working to improve the existing ways of working to just make the best decisions for the business. It’s not about AI for AI’s sake. There is some AI component and some data science component to the Risk Factors stuff that we’re doing, but it’s not about that. It’s about, hey, we’re able to process this data a lot quicker to be able to help you to make the right decisions for your business.
Brent – 00:26:52:
Yeah, for sure. So let’s get into application to your comment there about getting better at those sort of things. So let’s talk specific examples. So let’s talk about how like things that are going on, like IPS behavior tracking. Make sure you define that and then talk about Venn analysis and what’s going on from the standpoint of specific examples and what’s going on in the market.
Joel – 00:27:11:
I could take it by way of like a story. So we talked a little bit and then I talked a lot about our assurance team. And one of the stories that came through the assurance team was a carrier who came to us and said, hey, a broker flagged me using one of your products. I’m very upset about this. Why did you flag me? Well, we started to work the case and we said, all right, let’s start to understand what’s happened over the last three months. The long story short here is this carrier had been the victim of a phishing attack that they were completely unaware of. They did not know that their identity had been compromised. They did not know that their email address was not solely theirs. And that a bad actor had created an RMIS account on behalf of that carrier and was acting as that carrier. But because of the IP address data that we had that said, hey, there are some anomalous IP address logins that are happening across the TruckStop ecosystem. The broker was able to say, hey, no, I think there’s something wrong here. We’re not going to onboard. We’re not going to continue with this. When the real carrier came in and said, hey, this is me. I am who I say I am. And that identity. Really matters. Now, there’s a byproduct of that, right? The bad actor might be kicked out of the email address. We might have changed the email addresses and everything’s fine now. But there still is that sort of residual victimization, right? This carrier still has to deal with the fact that they were a victim of that. And so understanding the ways that you can fall victim to apparent fraud is really important, not only to protect yourself, but also to going back to that relationship piece. It’s like, hey, I was a victim of an attack. That’s what you’re seeing here within the data. What can I do to continue to build and start to rebuild that trust? I mean, that’s the obligation of that carrier within the broker network that carrier is dealing with. So the IP address data was like really important there, not only to protect the broker and the load, but also the carrier became aware that they were a victim. And a lot of times that doesn’t go disclosed, especially depending on the technical sophistication of the organization. I just don’t know. And in this case, now they know we start to surface that insight. Everyone becomes aware.
Lisa – 00:29:18:
I’ll say just a couple of things. So one piece is the challenge with fraud and all of this is that when we do things well, we are preventing things from happening. And it’s really hard to be able to see the number of things that you prevented from happening. But what we can see is that customer reported incidents of things that they have experienced on their site. We have received 95% fewer reported incidents from our customers since the beginning of 2024.
Brent – 00:29:45:
Say that statement again. I want Freight Nation to hear that statement again, Lisa.
Lisa – 00:29:49:
Yeah, so customer reported incidents have gone down by 95% since the beginning of 2024.
Brent – 00:29:55:
When you say hesitance, what do you mean?
Lisa – 00:29:58:
Incidents could be anything. So any of the things that we are talking about, it could be that a load was double brokered. It could be that a load was stolen. Any of the sort of main categories of fraud that we are talking about, like I said, we track all of these things. We do a whole diagnosis of why these things have happened, how we want to handle it within our system, how we want to refine our system to be able to prevent them going forward. So that is a really exciting metric for us. What I’ll add to Joel’s story about tools are tools at the end of the day. They are not silver bullets. I think that a mistake that I see brokerages making a lot is they buy a new tool expecting it to solve all of their problems. And a tool is really only as powerful as you are integrating it into your business processes. And so if you purchase a product like RMIS, RMIS is really built to automate workflow. And so you can have very basic workflow decisions. We’ll help you through all of that if you haven’t thought through it on your own. And you’ll experience a lot of benefit from workflow automation, onboarding, collection of insurance certificates, all of those pieces. But RMIS can become exponentially more powerful because what we can do is we can automate other things that you might be flagging or other pieces of data that you might be incorporating into your workflow. But in order to do that, that’s a real partnership is for us to understand what are the things that you are looking for on your side. And then we can come up with creative solutions to actually automate that within our onboarding, within our monitoring and our workflow systems. And that’s why we put a lot of emphasis on making sure that our products are really configurable because we know that brokerages each have their own sort of special ways of doing things that they want to look at in particular. And we really make sure that we can partner to incorporate those pieces into the product. And so it’s really just to say with TruXet products or any products that they aren’t silver bullets. And part of the responsibility of purchasing any kind of technological software is really having a plan for how you intend to implement it into your system, how you intend to drive adoption, because you can purchase Risk Factors. And if you don’t actually make sure that your frontline carrier sales reps are using it. You’re not going to reap the benefit of the intelligence that’s coming out of that product. And so it’s just both things have to be true in order to really be able to get the benefit of it.
Brent – 00:32:34:
Yeah, yeah, great point, Lisa. I appreciate you bringing that up because we’re going to talk a little bit about staying ahead. And you just already talked a little bit about how you can stay ahead of that. And I just think about like how, if it’s not being utilized within the workflow, like Joel was mentioning earlier, then it slows you down. And if it slows you down, it costs you time. Maybe you move less freight. And I realized that everybody wants to make sure that they’re protected. And that is primary to Truckstop, that you’re protected. So super important when you’re looking at those things. And also, if you’re a freight nation carrier out there, remember that you’re measured against a whole lot more than you used to be measured. You’re measured against over 40 different pieces of information in the market. And by the way, whatever service might be using that, whatever provider might be providing it to somebody and someone’s using it, sometimes that data is wrong. And I saw a recent statistic that I was at a cargo security conference. And they talked about that 35% had a wrong piece of information against a carrier. So it’s just super important that whatever product that someone’s using, that they have extremely good, trusted data relationships and trusted data vetting relationships, because we don’t want the carrier not to get the load either. And we don’t want the broker to not move the freight as fast as possible either. So let’s talk about fraudulent tactics and then let’s move into balancing speed and diligence. I mean, we’ve talked a little bit about that, but at least I’d love for you to jump into a little more detail, but anything else on staying ahead of fraudulent tactics out there?
Lisa – 00:33:52:
Yeah, well, I think what I’ll really go to is the balance piece of it. And I think it goes back to having a plan for how to implement technology. So there is an inherent tension between a carrier sales rep team and a compliance team. And that tension, that’s a good, healthy tension to have. Because if it were up to the compliance team, there would be 10 approved carriers. That’s an exaggeration. And if it were up to the carrier sales rep team, they would be able to use all the carry. And so I think that it is a lot of a question about how do you as a brokerage really define your compliance strategy? And what is the balance that you are trying to strike of having a robust carrier network, but also having a safe carrier network? And that balance is what is actually going to be different for every brokerage. And so what you need is a tool that allows you to calibrate your level of compliance control to the balance that you are seeking to strike as a business. Like I said, we really focus on building tools that allow a brokerage to calibrate to their requirements rather than to just what we see as the right balance. Because we don’t want to be the judge and jury of how other people do their business. We really want them to be in that kind of control. We can certainly give guidance and recommendations if that isn’t something that they’ve determined yet. And also having the flexibility of changing that bar at different times in the market cycle. So when you’re in a really high capacity market, your compliance standards, you actually have some flexibility to make those a little bit higher. When you’re in a tight capacity market, you might need to loosen those standards because you are in more need for carriers. And so really being able to control those things is what is important to make sure that you’re ultimately being able to deliver on your customer commitments, which is what every brokerage is in pursuit of doing at the end of the day.
Brent – 00:35:54:
Yeah, great comments on speed and balance. Super important. There’s that tension between the JLO, the way you described that. That’s super great. So we got a few minutes left, and I want to talk a little bit about the future of fraud prevention, Joel. So, man, I’ve talked to a lot of leaders in the marketplace, a lot of these guys that are high-level security, cargo security guys in the marketplace. And they say once you close one door, another one opens up when it comes to these bad actors and organized crime in here. So what’s some of the challenges that are ahead of us, Joel, and the solutions that you might see? And then I want to ask about advice and if they’ve been a victim of fraud, like where to go to find solutions in that. But, Joel, let’s talk about what’s the future of this thing.
Joel – 00:36:30:
So we talked a little bit about some of the limitations with the siloed data, right? Data living in different places and not being like a single pane of glass.
Brent – 00:36:38:
Now, when you say a single pane of glass, explain to the Fray Nation watchers and listeners what that means.
Joel – 00:36:43:
Single pane of glass basically means all the data in one place, and you have to look at one small screen to be able to see it all. So that previously didn’t exist. And we also know that there’s this desire to move from the descriptive to the much more prescriptive using data science, which is a lot more accessible. And when I say data science and when I say AI, I just want to be really clear. Like, this isn’t magic. It’s just math. It’s not something that we should really be scared of. It’s something that just is like, OK, it’s just math. It’s one plus one equals two. It’s just more complicated, and I can’t really even do it. But fortunately, we have a team here, and there are a lot of teams that can start to do this. But, like, as you start to move to it, you need… A framework that can take on new data. Right. And we’re glad that we didn’t build something that’s static. Right. And so the way we look at the problem, it’s not like, hey, Risk Factors in its current form is the final solution. Right. What we’re saying is, hey, this is a representation of the data that we have available to us now, and we’re going to continue to feed into it and extend it as we become aware of changes within the patterns of risk and the fraud that we’re seeing perpetrated in the ecosystem. So we built something that is flexible to that. And I think that’s really important in a solution to say, hey, I’m concerned about this this month. But, you know, next month, there’s going to be something else to be concerned about. I think early on in this year when we were talking to some of our customers, they said, hey, yeah, I care about IP addresses this month, but I’m not going to care about IP addresses next month. I’m going to care about something else. You need to make sure that you’re not locking me in. The logic that you say is important, that it’s actually you’re giving me all of the context for me to be able to bake it into my workflow. Because my needs as a brokerage are going to be different from brokerage B over here. And so it’s important to have a framework that kind of like changes as the space changes.
Brent – 00:38:33:
Right. We have to morph just like the marketplace morphs. No doubt. That’s fantastic. All right. So let’s jump into the last sort of piece of advice. So for the watchers and listeners, Lisa and Joel, if they’d been a victim of fraud in the marketplace, what should they immediately do? And maybe Lisa, this is this. Maybe it is more. I have a question for you because you’re on the external end of this all day long. So what’s the Truckstop advice on that?
Lisa – 00:38:56:
Yeah. Number one, report it to the police. It is actually the thing that is the most overlooked, and it’s the most important if you are trying to recoup any lost funds.
Brent – 00:39:07:
Let me add one thing to that. Report it to the police where the theft happened, not to where you live or anywhere else. Report it to the police in that city, in that town, wherever it happened, right there. So continue on.
Lisa – 00:39:20:
Yep, absolutely. So we’ve been really fortunate to have forged a relationship with the FDI over the past couple of years and their freight task force. They are working very hard to combat sort of this epidemic, if we want to call it that, over the past couple of years. And so we have been partnering with them to make sure that we are sharing what information we can about trends that we are seeing to help them do their job. They are looking for reports of these incidents so that they can do their research. And so it’s really important to report it to the local authorities. The second thing that I would do is engage with the businesses that you have relationships. So with Truckstop, Joel gave this excellent example of where we are able to do enough validation to be able to say this person’s account was compromised. We are going to do password resets. We are going to do whatever forensics we need to do to make sure that we are giving the right information to the right person. Same thing we have had if a brokerage account was compromised, then maybe there were false posted loads. We make sure that we scrub all of that from our system. We alert people who need to be alerted so that they can do whatever they need to do. And then for a carrier engaging with those brokerages where you have relationships, because if your data was compromised, to your point, they’re going to be seeing compromised data and it’s not going to be obvious that it’s wrong. And so making sure that you’re working with those brokerages and going through it, it’s probably not going to be a very fun process, but going through those steps to actually rebuild that trust, regain your identity verification, make sure that they have the information that they need to feel confident to work with you again. Those are really the first steps to take and do it quickly because it likely will take some time and you want to make sure that you start that early to minimize any kind of impact that is had on the business.
Brent – 00:41:13:
Yeah, amen to that. So, Joel, anything to add on that?
Joel – 00:41:16:
Well said. No notes.
Brent – 00:41:17:
Well, look, I appreciate from Lisa’s point is immediate action is important. On Joel’s end, make sure that all your data is internally. You have access. It’s all interrelated to each other. You can see it all. And then make sure that the networks that you’re using, Freight Nation, whether it’s a proprietary piece of data that you developed or whether you’ve purchased it from somebody else like Chuck Stopp or the many other great players that are in the marketplace, just make sure that’s all networked together so you can be protected as much as possible. And I loved what you said, Joel. Don’t be afraid of all this stuff. It’s not magic. It’s just math. I’ve never heard anybody say it that way. I love that. I love when it gets boiled down to the simple. But it goes back to what Lisa started off with. Have somebody that’s been around. Have somebody that has great scale and scope in the market. And it’s somebody that by your use of them, you’ve developed a trust over the years that they’re going to help you. To Joel’s point on when there was a problem with the person, with the company he talked about, that our assurance department actually helped them solve the problem and make them aware of something. But they weren’t even aware of it. So make sure you’ve got trusted partners no matter what across the board. And these are two great trusted partners at Chuck Stopp that I love working with. And so, Lisa, Joel, thank you so much for joining me on Freight Nation today.
Lisa – 00:42:27:
Thanks, Brent. It was fun.
Joel – 00:42:28:
Thank you.
Brent – 00:42:29:
Yeah, fantastic. Freight Nation, we’re always out there trying to help you. We’re trying to defend things for you and make sure that we’re helping protect your business. Just know that no matter what it is. And Freight Nation, don’t forget, like we always like to say, don’t forget to work hard, to be kind, and to stay humble. We’ll catch you the next time, Freight Nation. Thanks for watching. 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 forward slash 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.
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