How did Freight Transportation become so Broken?
The amount of Freight Fraud, Theft, and Carriers/Drivers not compliant with State and Federal transportation regulations is at an all-time high. How did we get here? We can start with deregulation in the 1980s. Deregulation opened the market — lowering costs but also fragmenting it into hundreds of thousands of small players, which is viewed as both a good thing and most recently, a bad thing. In the past 10 years or so, especially during covid, the industry saw explosive growth in load boards, digital brokers, and online dispatch services. Fraudsters exploit the system by double brokering (reselling a load without the shipper’s permission). Others use identity theft, stealing a legitimate carrier’s MC number and collecting a load payment or even the load itself. These types of scams exploded once transactions moved fully online, because verification became much harder while volume ballooned. During this time the basics of moving freight, a Shipper (Owner ...