Who's Really Hauling Your Freight? Rethinking Freight Security and Carrier Vetting

Freight fraud didn't explode because criminals got smarter. It exploded because the industry digitized a high-trust network without ever stopping to verify who was actually on it.

That's the argument Michael Caney, co-founder and CRO of Highway, makes in this episode. His reference point is the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and the 2008 financial collapse — both cases where a system operated on assumed trust until someone noticed the hole and started exploiting it at scale. Freight in the 2010s made the same mistake: digital load boards and book-it-now flows created speed and scale but stripped out the identity checks that made the old fax-and-phone system, however clunky, reasonably hard to defraud.

Highway's answer was to build what Caney calls "know your carrier" — banking-grade identity verification applied to motor carriers before they ever touch a load. In just Q2 of one year, Highway blocked 700 carrier users from 40 countries attempting unauthorized logins, stopped 50,000 fraudulent inbound phone calls, and flagged 300 unauthorized FMCSA contact changes. Inbox-related fraud attempts grew 40% between January and June, from 90,000 incidents to 187,000.

The fraud vectors themselves have evolved. Early attackers brute-forced carrier vetting portals. Once identity checks made that harder, they moved to phone social engineering: calling broker reps pretending to be the driver on a load, then extracting just enough information — a pickup number, a reference code, a facility name — to intercept the shipment. International call centers have organized around this, archiving public load board data and web-scraping shipper names and locations to make their calls sound credible.

Caney's prescription is both technical and cultural. On the product side, Highway secures rate confirmations behind a login so that even a compromised email inbox can't hand a fraudster the documents they need. On the culture side, he argues that brokers who do this well have one thing in common: they're willing to say no. They track overrides. They treat fraud prevention like a SOC 2 audit — a company-wide mandate, not a software feature.

The second half of the episode covers Highway's Trusted Freight Exchange (TFX), a carrier network built on proof-of-stake identity claims — ELD-connected, insurance-verified, location-confirmed — where brokers stay the point of the transaction and carriers can move through their favorite partners without downloading anything or getting flooded with calls.