Jason Decker of brokerage General Transportation and carrier ART Trucking, based in Van Buren, Arkansas, gave a talk at the Mid-America Trucking Show on ways carriers and brokers can work together to combat what he called "one of the biggest issues we have going on right now, causing heartache and headache for everyone." Namely, double brokering and other fraud in spot freight transactions, dragging down rates through misrepresentation/skimming and in some cases outright theft.
Decker introduced a carrier/broker-lookup application for Android devices (iPhone on the way in just a couple weeks, he said) called Trucking 101 that he hopes individual carriers might use to effect. It's also available via the "Load Check" functionality at the Trucking 101 website.
Decker outlined various flavors of fraud and scams out there, most of which Overdrive has detailed in prior coverage. Those include the fuel-advance scam, related broker and carrier impersonation/identity theft schemes, the same aimed at actual cargo theft, and the rings of FMCSA-registered carriers and brokers with authority working together to double-broker freight just to skim various amounts out of the load, with no intention of actually moving freight and in too many cases no one any the wiser.
The various rings doing all of this "are running a good scam," Decker said, "and they know they are. ... A lot of individuals and companies [in trucking] don't understand it."
Follow the links above for more. In addition, there's another that might rear its head when one of the double-brokering entities is at the end of its rope, whether cut off by the big load boards or otherwise exposed in some way. Decker called it "getting ghosted by the broker" you were dealing with on a load, never paid. "I’ve swallowed that pill a few times" as a carrier, he said.
[Related: Broker Reforms: A 'hit it and move on' scam, and more loopholes]
