03/06/2025
FMCSA Is Failing Freight Brokers:
If you're a freight broker, you know the risks we take every day. Fraud is out of control, cargo theft is at an all-time high, and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA)—the agency literally tasked with overseeing safety in our industry—refuses to help.
Case in point: A fellow broker at Starking Transportation recently tried to verify an email address with the FMCSA to make sure they weren’t dealing with a scammer. Confirming an email belongs to a legitimate business should be basic fraud prevention. But the FMCSA refused. The very agency in charge of making sure our industry runs safely and legally won’t verify public information.
Let’s talk numbers. The Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA) found that freight fraud is costing brokers over $400,000 per company on average.
CargoNet reported that cargo theft in 2024 was at record levels, with 3,625 reported thefts—a 27% jump from 2023.
Strategic cargo theft—where scammers pose as legit carriers, steal loads, and disappear jumped 430% year-to-year.
Despite all this, brokers are completely on our own when it comes to stopping fraud. Brokers typically resort to depending on each other to verify carriers because we can't rely on the FMCSA to help us stay safe. If a scammer walks away with a load, the FMCSA won’t take the hit—we do. We lose the money, the trust of our customers, and sometimes even our businesses.
While the FMCSA refuses to verify something as simple as an email address to stop fraud, they’re more than happy to enforce "broker transparency" rules—aka, forcing brokers to disclose our financials to carriers.
No other industry does this. Apple isn’t legally required to tell customers that it costs them $400 to make an iPhone, which they sell to you for $1,600 (75% profit margin!)—because that would ruin their business. Yet brokers are somehow expected to open our own books?
Carriers have a choice. If they don’t like a rate, they can reject a load with no consequence. That’s how free markets work. Carriers are not required to be transparent about their profits vs what they pay their drivers.
Brokers are the ones keeping freight moving, vetting carriers, and taking on all the risks. The FMCSA’s refusal to verify carriers while demanding full financial disclosure is beyond biased. It puts brokers in a no-win situation where we’re expected to prevent fraud without any support, pay out of pocket when there is theft, risking our livelihoods—all while being forced to share sensitive financial info that no one else in business has to disclose.
If the FMCSA wants to make the industry safer, they would
give brokers a secure way to verify carrier contact info and stop enforcing “transparency” policies that no other industry has to follow.
Until then, fraud will keep getting worse, brokers will keep getting blamed, and criminals will keep making money off a broken system.
Below is our call with the FMCSA. Nothing has been edited from this call. The call starts at 00:19 and ends when the owner of StarKing hung up.