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Brokers make a distinction between co-brokering, done legitimately as a necessity in a fast-paced business environment, and double-brokering, done surreptitiously, often by fraudsters intending to steal freight.

Carriers and brokerages may have co-­brokering agreements that require specific procedures if they are going to re-broker freight, said Zak Bowyer, vice president of sales support operations for Total Quality Logistics.

For example, he said, “We have a large carrier we work with and if they’re going to re-broker our freight, they have to reveal to us the end carrier so that we can put them through our security vetting procedures and ensure that the end-use carrier is going to meet the needs of our client.”

Bowyer added, “I’d say we do that as rarely as we need to.”

Done covertly, the same practice is called double-brokering and “can certainly be a gateway to a lot of problems,” Bowyer said.

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Bowyer 

“You lose communication, you can lose visibility, and that’s also a practice that’s exploited majorly by organized cargo criminals to steal freight,” he added.

More than 100,000 carriers in its network are eligible to haul loads, Bowyer noted.

Scott Cornell, chair of the Transported Asset Protection Association, said double- brokering “always starts with an identity theft, meaning the bad guys will steal the identity of a legitimate trucking company.”

Pretending to be that company, the fraudsters bid on a load via a load board or directly with a broker, Cornell said. If they get through the broker’s vetting process, they are then assigned a load. The impostors then assume yet another identity, as a broker, and assign the load to a legitimate trucking company that has no idea that it is being assigned a load that is going to be stolen, Cornell said.

The organized rings understand trucking language and the transportation industry, and know exactly what to say to a driver.

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Cornell 

“The driver would never really think they were talking to anybody but a freight broker looking for capacity,” he said. The carrier is told it’s a “blind shipment” and to call the fake broker once the load has been picked up. Cornell said the driver typically is directed to a cross-dock, and that is where the freight laundering begins.

Guarding against double-brokering is a time-consuming and constant challenge, brokers and others said.

Brian Gill, chief technology officer for load board operator DAT Freight & Analytics, said illegitimate dispatchers can be anywhere in the world.

“They don’t have authority,” he said. “They’re effectively double brokers.”

Gill said DAT has internet tools to show what he called “impossible travel” — where someone is logged in from another country when they were supposed to be in a certain location in the U.S. Compliance personnel at DAT receive an alert when that happens.

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Gill 

“It helps us start to pick up these illegal dispatchers a lot quicker,” he said.

Activity patterns on the website can reveal the double-brokers, Gill added, as they are seen searching extensively for targets.

“Their patterns are different from what you would see from a legitimate broker or carrier,” he said, adding that DAT enlists a mix of algorithms and humans to look for such patterns and safeguard the network.

From 2022 into 2023, a surge was detected, Gill said, and DAT closed more than 12,000 accounts on its website due to fraud and other violations.