[Stay on top of transportation news: Get TTNews in your inbox.]
Perspective: Cargo theft starts where vetting ends
Why real-time driver verification at pickup is the freight industry’s next line of defense
Key Takeaways:
- Panfilov argues carrier vetting alone cannot curb cargo theft because verification often stops before drivers take custody at docks.
- Reported losses from cargo theft reached $725 million in 2025, while strategic theft rose 1,475% from 2022 to 2024, according to Verisk CargoNet.
- Panfilov urges real-time verification showing that each pickup driver is credentialed for the shipment and dispatched by the carrier of record.
The freight industry has spent the past decade building better ways to vet carriers, and the tools brokers and shippers have access to today are more sophisticated than ever. And yet cargo theft has never been higher.
Voluntarily reported cargo theft losses reached $725 million in 2025, according to Verisk CargoNet. The average value per incident jumped 36% in a single year. Strategic theft escalated 1,475% between 2022 and 2024. If better carrier vetting alone was the answer, those numbers would be going the other direction. They’re not — which means the industry has been unable to find a solution for the whole problem.
Every tool the industry has built is designed to answer one question: Is this carrier legitimate? That question matters, but it is not all that matters when freight actually exchanges hands.
The moment that matters is when a driver shows up at a dock and custody transfers. Pickup is notoriously the weakest moment in freight and precisely the moment the industry has left unaddressed. Double-brokering schemes and fictitious pickups exploit this gap, and the bad actors are even finding new ways in. The Trojan Driver Scam is one of the more sophisticated: Cargo theft organizations plant members inside legitimate carriers to target high-value loads. What makes it a unique challenge is that it allows vetting and compliance processes to run exactly as designed. The criminal doesn’t need to defeat the vetting process when it isn’t looking at them.
Image
Panfilov
The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II has rightly focused the industry’s attention on carrier vetting. The liability exposure brokers now face will push many to tighten their onboarding processes and document their carrier selection decisions more thoroughly. That pressure is warranted. But it will drive the industry to do more of what it already does — verify that a carrier exists, has clean records and is adequately insured. It raises the stakes for getting carrier vetting right, but it doesn’t close the driver gap that organized networks have been exploiting.
Neither does the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s crackdown on the underground market for aged carrier authority numbers — registrations that criminal networks were buying specifically because older records signal credibility in broker vetting systems. Well-intentioned, but incomplete. When acquiring a carrier identity gets harder, impersonating one becomes the more efficient path. The bad guys respond to friction the same way any business would — by finding the route with less of it. That route runs straight through the gap between verifying a carrier and verifying who is actually picking up the load.
Closing that gap means moving the verification line forward — from carrier onboarding to the moment of pickup itself. Verifying not just that a carrier is legitimate, but that the specific driver taking custody of a load is credentialed for that shipment and dispatched by the carrier of record, in real time. That’s a meaningfully different question than the industry has answered in the past, and it’s where attention needs to be now.
Image
The verification standard doesn’t shift just because the problem gets bigger. It also shifts because the better option — modern carrier and driver-level vetting — becomes available and the expectation of using the technology becomes the norm. That dynamic is now in motion at the driver level, and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling makes it harder to defer.
The criminals running these schemes aren’t stealing trailers from rest stops. They’re studying compliance workflows and finding the exact point where verification stops. That point has been the dock for too long.
Alex Panfilov is the founder and CEO of Verified Carrier, a fraud prevention and motor carrier vetting company.
