“Professional carriers communicate well, ask good questions, do their due diligence on inspecting loads, and communicate immediately with the shipper, customer, and dispatcher if they are concerned about quality, condition, temperature, and delivery instructions,” Stoiber explains. “Red flags for a marginal carrier can be asking for the entire settlement to be advanced, not making check calls when en route, showing up late without a valid excuse, losing paperwork, or turning off his/her cell phone,” he says.
Fraud & Theft
Brokers have learned to be vigilant about fraud, especially on busy Friday afternoons, and especially in South Florida. “Thieves come out of the woodwork,” Strickland says. “They think no one is checking, everyone is in a hurry, everyone wants to go home, and procedures will get lax.” Even when insurance and other checks look good, “you load a carrier and come to find out on Monday morning that your load has disappeared, and you already paid for it.”
Identity theft involving carriers has been increasing recently, Lund says. “One of the unintended consequences of CSA is that when carriers get a bad score, they will change their name or buy another trucking company with a good score, then absorb the name of the company they acquired.”
Additionally, Lund says FMCSA doesn’t do a good job purging carriers that have gone out of business from its records, prompting opportunists to book a load, get an advance, and simply disappear. Further, identity thieves know the produce industry relies on a great number of small carriers, which makes it “fairly easy to pretend to be somebody else,” he adds. And he warns, “you have to be careful using load boards, because that’s where the bad guys often troll for loads.”
Verification includes doublechecking phone numbers and addresses, and confirming the address actually exists—using a tool like Google Earth. Lund recounts how one search for a trucking company revealed the address to be a UPS Store where the fraudulent trucker had only a mailbox, even though it seemed like a regular street address.
Monitoring Carriers
After a new carrier has been set up, brokers and shippers need to make sure all the information and certifications are current. For example, has there been a recent violation or safety rating change? Will insurance coverage lapse during a multiday haul?
“We rely on the SaferWatch, mainly just for the safety rating,” explains Lovell. “SaferWatch monitors the bodily injury and property damage coverage, and we use it to monitor contract authority too.”
For contracts and insurance coverage, Patterson Companies monitors carriers through software from the Keypoint division of TransCore, which flags lapsing insurance certificates.
“We expect that a load picked up today will be delivered within five days max. So if the carrier’s insurance is going to expire four days from today, the system will not allow them to load that carrier. We want to make sure it is covered all the way through,” Lovell notes.
