Everything is Logistics
A podcast for the thinkers in freight. Everything is Logistics is hosted by Blythe Brumleve and we're telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff (and people!) get from point A to B.
Industry topics include freight, logistics, transportation, maritime, warehousing, intermodal, and trucking along with the intersection of technology and marketing within the industry.
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Everything is Logistics
Stopping Freight Fraud with Highway
Freight fraud is escalating at an alarming rate. Cargo theft, double brokering, and identity fraud have increased by 500% year over year, leaving brokers and carriers struggling to stay ahead.
In this episode of Everything is Logistics, host Blythe Brumleve sits down with Reid Clements of Highway to discuss how identity verification technology is preventing fraud before it happens.
Key Topics:
- The biggest fraud threats in freight today
- How criminals are buying fake MC numbers for as little as $300
- AI-driven fraud, including voice cloning and FMCSA hacks
- How Highway’s single sign-on system is eliminating fraud
- Real-time risk detection and carrier verification tools
This conversation is essential for brokers, carriers, and anyone in freight who wants to avoid costly fraud.
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Welcome
Blythe Brumleve:into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I'm your host, Blythe Milligan, and we are proudly sponsored by SPI logistics, and we've got another great show for you live at manifest, the future of supply chain and logistics. And we've got Reed Clements from Highway, who I've been trying to get on this show for a very long time. It's not without effort. We just kept missing each other. But now we're here. We're
Reid Clements:here. We got it. Thank you. Thank you so much. Really happy to be here absolutely now,
Blythe Brumleve:what do you do for highway? For those who've been living under a rock, what do you do for highway? And then what does highway do for other companies? Yeah, I
Unknown:am on the sales team. I think my title is sales. I don't know if we have other titles, but sales account executive, I knew I had something formal, but sales, so I'm talking to brokerages day in, day out, sharing the gospel of highway. And then to your other question, what is highway? We are an identity and access management provider to help brokers and carriers connect via a seamless single sign on experience. That's the formal and then what we actually do is we help carriers on board to brokerages via a single sign on experience, kind of like when you press site into Google to get YouTube TV. We want to help carriers get to approach experiences like that, and at the same time, eliminate fraud. If you're to dive in, I'm ready to go deep here. All right, all right, all right. So, so fraud became a big problem. Post pandemic, really pandemic. Post pandemic, when freight got a big highlight on it, like everyone in the entire world saw the word supply chain, and then supply chain got very popular. And with popularity, you have the good guys and the bad guys, the good actors, bad actors, the bad actors saw fraud as a golden like, golden egg, like, why would I not try this? Because fraud lives in a environment where there's kind of three things are necessary, prospect of gain, right? What can I get from this? And in freight, it's the actual freight. Let me steal this Anheuser Bucha load, or this, these, I think I saw a report eggs were stolen last week. So if prospect of gain, what is the actual freight? How much money can I make from it? Whether it's double broken the load and getting a small load and getting a small cut or stealing the load and getting 100,000 a million dollars worth of freight there. So prospective gain, you have anonymity. We're we've all lived in the broker lifestyle. We know how brokers work. At the end of the day, you're picking up a phone and talk to someone over the phone. You're emailing them. You're not shaking their hand in a coffee shop and saying we're going to do business together, more often than not, you post a load and you have 100 carriers calling you, so you have no idea who they are. So it's a big anonymity aspect to it. And the third would be cost of your gain, anonymity, urgency in freight, every single broker is doing 100 things at once for all of their customers, and the game of speed. So is this valuable? You don't know me, so there's low risk. And with urgency comes air. Human error is having too fast. So frog became rampant. How he came in to solve the problem. Now, from
Blythe Brumleve:what I understand, you guys connect into the VIN number. Or is that how it
Unknown:works? Yeah, they're bunch of different ways. So the first is, who is this person? Are they? Do they belong here? So are you human? Are you where you're supposed to be? Do you have permission to be here from the carrier level? And then you go deeper and look at their MC, D, O T to say, Do you have the authority? Do you have the insurance necessary to hold my freight, that
Blythe Brumleve:kind of thing? So on board them, so they're on boarding a carrier onboarding, even
Unknown:just looking it up like before you onboard, is this the right person? Okay? And then then you have the VIN level data, which we get from multiple avenues. But then the COI, the insurance cert itself, will list the VINs. What we do, that's proprietary, is connected to carries. ELD, so if you have 10 trucks and you're on Sam, Sarah, or motive, or what have you, ELD, we connect to the ELD account to say you do have 10 trucks, and here they are, and there's the bins listed, or you claim to have 10 there's only one truck that's moved in the past seven days. Like, Where's, where's the rest of the trucks? Why aren't there in your insurance policy? Why are you planning 10, but you're lying, or vice versa. Why are you planning 10 without 80? What's going on here?
Blythe Brumleve:That's I saw one of y'all demos at freight waves. Yeah, it was somebody, I guess, one of these carriers was saying that they're going to cover like 12 different loads, and then you only had eight trucks, and so that put it up, I guess, higher on your dashboard and highway, if you have a highway account, correct me, if I'm wrong, but it's like a dashboard, and then in the dashboard, that priority item goes up to the Top, yeah, warn you that this person might not, they might
Unknown:Exactly. Oh, you got it, yeah. It's a trigger warning for for anyone to know. And that specific news, we call it an overbooked carrier alert. Like the guy has eight trucks. He's booked 12 loads from 12 different brokerages. Each broker thinks you're booking one load with HR carrier, which is what you're supposed to do. Like you wouldn't book 12 loads of the eight truck carrier yourself, but 12 different brokers have now booked to this eight truck carrier, and he accepted all 12 loads. Since we have a network effect of serving these brokers, we can see that this eight truck carrier has booked 12 loads that are going all across the country. If it was like chatting to Atlanta, it's possible, right? But we're not going to trigger an alert, because they're short hauls. You can do more than. Unloading day. But if it's more than x percent or X number of miles, if it's within this same schedule, pickup delivery date, you're gonna get an alert he's overbooked his
Blythe Brumleve:assets. What's the craziest type of fraud you've seen so far
Unknown:in terms of, like, manipulative activity, or like stolen freight, or like help slipped through
Blythe Brumleve:manipulative and the craziest, like load that was stolen. Yeah, trying to be stolen. I'm
Unknown:not gonna go specific on the type of freight or the customer, but the higher the value of freight, the more eyes on it, the more the FBI gets involved, of course. So the easiest thing I can think of is, like precious metals or alcohol, stuff like that that are if you steal the load, it's easy to resell that. You take it across the border and people want to buy that kind of thing. Of thing. So those are always the hot ticket for automation. You should always be on red alert. The higher the value, the more red alert you should be on. From that perspective, then, in terms of creativity, to manipulate something, you have the VoIP phone numbers. That's a very easy indicator. If you're a truck driver, why do you have a VoIP instead of a cell phone? Right? It's pretty simple. The the fraudulent phone numbers themselves, instead of a VoIP, it's a phone number, but you scoop the phone number, you can get an app and change your phone number to recalling or the fraudulent emails. The biggest you put a zero and seven, Oh, who's going to look at that in an email or an l7 I lower, yeah, it's stuff like, That's wild. And then the more creative, like, the more sophisticated hacking the FMCSA, changing the FMCSA information, which is what everyone uses the source of truth for so long, but now you think you're talking the right person, but your FMCSA data was just hacked, and it's the fraudster who's impersonating the good guy. The good guy screwed. The broker worker with the good guy screwed. There's a mess. And
Blythe Brumleve:how does that work? If, like, the FMCSA gets hacked, do they alert everyone that they've been hacked? Or probably not, like, how does that?
Unknown:I'm not going to speak ill of the government, but you know, they don't know half the time, right? Why would the FMCSA know that this person who's trying to log in and change a couple things. Okay, okay, they're requesting a new code to change your password and get in, or something like that. Or, I think Jordan, our founder, talked about this like, a year ago, but there's some really sophisticated crime rings that downloaded the entire from CSA database and did a query to search any misspelled email, because at the end of the day, a carrier or you and I could misspell our own email when signing up with the government. And then that's your formal email. Or you sign up for an email you misspelled it yourself, right? And then they'll find those queries of emails that were just one letter off or something. And then they'll make the correct email, so that when you're looking them up, are you talking the right person, the wrong person, the right person is actually the wrong email. But you don't think that. Why would you talk the wrong email? So there's,
Blythe Brumleve:how are y'all, I guess I with all of these, like, new, you know, sort of AI voice cloning type things. How are you guys prepared to help with that type of level of fraud? Because that was one of the things as a podcaster, I knew about sort of my voice cloning for a long time, that I could go and I could get this done for 30 seconds for $10 a month, right? But now other, many more people are going to have access to this technology all across the globe. How? What is the philosophy against combating that?
Unknown:Yeah, there's a lot of avenues you can go down here, but I'm going to take a step up and talk about the life cycle of the load and what you can do to combat each part. So you have communications, you have sourcing, you have vetting, onboarding, monitoring, tracking, and then post load, delivery, gathering the correct information, the details on what happened there. So that's kind of the life cycle of the load. That's where highway wants to live. Is every piece of the life cycle load. So communications, first and foremost, before you even onboard or Vedic care, you talk to them. They email you, they call you, vice versa. So we have an email plugin and a phone plugin. Email plugin lives on your Gmail, on your outlook, on your front app to give you a quick indicator. Red light your light. Green light just a good guy or a bad guy. Same for the phone system. When a carrier calls in, if you have the VoIP plug in, it lives in the phone system. And just like a spam filter on all of our phones, Red Alert. This is not who you think it is. This is a from the VoIP. This is a spoofed phone number. This. This phone number already has nine fraud reports on their profile, and the carrier is associated with it's just going to block the call. So communications is there sourcing? Find every single carrier we have your ELDs connected. So where are your trucks right now? It's a good indicator for where their trucks are right. So help you find the right capacity. Are they passing or failing your custom risk assessment that you host in highway? So as soon as you look up a carrier, green light, red light. Use them. Don't use them. Onboarding, powered by the identity engine, right? Are you who you say you are? It's a single sign on multi factor authentication process that has 80 different permutations of challenging the person on. Are you who you claim to be or not? Right? And if you fail, that you're out. I didn't even
Blythe Brumleve:fail. I didn't think about it for. That lens, because I thought that you guys, you know, I tried to simplify it in my head, that you're just connecting the carrier to the VIN number, and then that's kind of it, and then it's up to the broker and the carrier. Used to be
Unknown:that easy, right? It used to be that easy. That's evolved. I guess you have to be a cyber security expert to figure out all this stuff. So you have all that we can go very deep with identity proofing, which is where you can take your license out and scan it and scan it and scan the barcode, then you put your face up and you do the all the fun. So that's what the Department of Defense uses, right? It's identity proofing. Are you who you claim to be, and do you match? So we can go as deep as that. We can keep it pretty lightweight, depending on what we know of the carrier, and then onboarding, track and trace, low level compliance. It's all part of highway, yeah.
Blythe Brumleve:What is, I guess, sort of the typical pushback that you might get from a customer who might want to and then how do you answer that? Our
Unknown:biggest when I'm talking to a prospect, the there's two reasons they wouldn't buy sophistication and price. Price aside, we all know price is price? Do you bring value? The value is there or not? Sophistication is the other one? We do a lot for you, and when a broker sends it for highway, you're gonna understand 20% of what we do, and you're not gonna have any idea what 80% of it does. Then once you've been a customer for a year, you're gonna understand 50% of it, and 50% you'll have no idea what's happening that's on purpose. Like you don't know what Google is doing when you press send into Google. You don't know what Wi Fi is doing. When you log into Wi Fi, you don't have to know. You trust it. You work it. But I think sophistication of you're buying something you've never heard of, you never seen of, you didn't know is necessary until you just lost four loads last week. That's typically the pushback.
Blythe Brumleve:And then I would imagine that for a lot of those people who push back on price, once they lose a few loads. Then they, they come around.
Unknown:It's a boomerang. Yeah, you made some, you know, six months ago, and then the inbox is open, respond, and we'll come back. What
Blythe Brumleve:is sort of, I guess, the percentage of, maybe growth of fraud that has evolved since, yeah, yeah. It sounds like it's just changing every day.
Unknown:I read cargo net stuff, because COVID is very popular, and they post a lot of stats. I want to say, like every year it's growing by like, 200% 300% 400% but the caveat there is, it's not 300% since 2020 it's 300% over 2022 and then 500% over 2023 and then 80% over 2024 so it's not a little bit more each year. It's compounding exponentially every year.
Blythe Brumleve:And is that because of technology or just it because maybe some regulations that we lack in the United States?
Unknown:Yeah. I mean, maybe both. Yes, yes. I think it all boils back to what we said first, prospective gain, anonymity, urgency. It's a hot bed for for stolen items. Like, why would prospective gain? You get caught often, and if you do get caught, then your MC is broken, like, you get unauthorized. You're caught. Just go buy a 300 RMC number and start again. Is that really how easy it is? Yeah, you and I can make an MC right now. Everything is logistics, LLC, trucking, right? We can build it. It's 300 bucks.
Blythe Brumleve:What? Yeah, I had no idea was that easy to get it. Had to get a CDL or and then MC the bear to
Unknown:entry is very low, which
Blythe Brumleve:is maybe a good thing. Yeah,
Unknown:right, nothing and everything. But yeah, any
Blythe Brumleve:good customer stories that you can share with us, or you can leave the customer name out, or case, yeah, I mean,
Unknown:we have public customer testimonies if you go to highway.com hit the articles or Partners tab, whatever it is, you can see a bunch of customers who want to publicly announce that they partner with highway. And here's their stats of 90% fraud prevention or 100% fraud prevention, which is wonderful. They're all great stories. All of a sudden, we're on the spot. I know, mode just announced. Ch Robins did a big announcement. Finish a did one? Taylor logistics has done one, but they're on the website.
Blythe Brumleve:Wow, yeah, so we'll make sure. We'll definitely link to it in the show notes, so you guys can check it out. If you've obviously been living under a rock and have not, you know, read any of this, because you guys are everywhere. It feels like you're also, like, integrated with everyone as well. Yeah, integrations
Unknown:are necessary because you can have a wonderful product, and that does everything for you. But if it's not integrated, then you still have the human error aspect, like, did you actually do this or not? Whereas, if it's integrated the system, it's a system wide, company wide initiative, like, it's either in or it's out, it's fully integrated. There's no, you're not the one going in saying, Yes, we use them, or no, we don't. It's system wide. It's integrated. So it has, I mean, that's the beauty of a full software solution, is it touches everything. Where you live.
Blythe Brumleve:What does this sort of the onboarding process look like for a carrier, for
Unknown:like a brokerage signing up today? Oh, maybe both. Yeah. So carriers, single sign on. You press into highway, if you've been before, you go straight to, how do I get paid by this broker? And sign their BCA, and you're done. So it's 20 seconds. If you've never been to highway. It's about a four minute process. You have to get verified, go through the full SSO and then verify the information we already know about you, locations, you run insurance, payment details, w9 all the onboarding stuff. So care. Onboarding can be 20 seconds. It can be four minutes. We onboard like 25,000 carries a day. I think the median is 27 Seconds, and that's for everybody, which is pretty blows my mind. So that's Carrie onboarding, and then as a new customer comes to Highway, depends on what CMS they're on and on how long it's going to take. You have your great it's a horrible word to say. You have your more modern TMS systems that that you can integrate quickly with. Yeah, exactly. Versus rev Nova, Turbo, tie three PL systems, guys like that, where you can sign up for highway and within seven days, you're fully live, baked in, and you're on or you have the bigger brand names that have been around for forever, McCloud, mercurygate, those types that may take 3060, days to get integrated, because it's a carrier process. But yeah,
Blythe Brumleve:what does, how does if I'm a broker and I'm sitting down at my desk and I have my four screens that are open, where does highway sort of sit in my day to day? Is it? Is it taking up one of those screens? And then I'm doing other things? Yeah,
Unknown:so let's put a couple different hats on. You're a broker on the floor, you're a carrier app, or your Creator of the grave highway is absolutely one of those screens, because part of highway is sourcing capacity. How do I find carriers who go from Milwaukee to Des Moines that are reefer carriers that have smart way certifications, that have at least three trucks, no more than 50? Because I don't want any big fleets. I don't want any onesies Tuesdays that have 100,000 in cargo coverage, insurance. Create my filter. Here's every carrier who runs that lane. You meet your criteria. Are they passing, filling my rules? So there's a sourcing and vetting aspect to it that your your reps are going to need. They're going to want them. You don't have to have them, but you're going to want that right there. Your compliance team, ideally, is only managing exceptions at that point when the when your broker, who, who really wants to use this carrier, be found your rules, you're going to bubble it up to your compliance team to say, hey, they're fine, but it's only for this which is not fraud related. Maybe it's performance related or safety scores, but can we use this care? And then the compliance guy is going to dig in and say, Well, normally we wouldn't, but their ELD is connected, so I see their truck in Milwaukee right now, so override let them in. So they're going to use it a few times a day. And then you have your track and trace team, which is going to have it open all the time. You have your have your your there's different hats, and how often they're going to use it. I wouldn't say every person and every broker is going to have a highway login at all, but depending on how nuanced you want to get and how deep you want to go, they're going to have the highway UI pulled up, or they're going to be fully integrated through TMS. They're just going to log into TMS to see it right there. You can go both ways. But so
Blythe Brumleve:what happens if you discover a problem after you've already booked the carrier?
Unknown:Yeah? Yeah, that's a that's a big problem, right? Yeah. So you so the beauty of highway being integrated is that we do web hook integrations, or API integrations to TMS systems. It's an API integration. It monitors carriers every five minutes, three, five or seven minutes being on the TMS. So on that schedule, you're going to get the alert insurance changed, or CSA scores under threshold, or Fraud Report, right Fraud Report, it goes from passing to failing, integrating your TMS like that, or you have a webhook integration, which webhook is push and pull, and it's immediate. As soon as something happens, it's immediate, the response is in your TMS right there. Now to your point, you already booked the load. Maybe the carrier's on the load, actively, Red Alert. Like everyone all eyes on you're calling the carrier, what's going on? You're tracking the ELD. Where's your truck right now? There's not much.
Blythe Brumleve:I just put it two and two together. You kept saying, like, Red Alert, green alert, highway, the highway lights. I just put that
Unknown:together. Yeah. Took me a minute. I'm right there, but it took me about a year. So you're like a year and 20 minutes fast.
Blythe Brumleve:Now you came from freight waves, yeah. And what was it? What was the reason? What it maybe is the biggest difference between freight waves and then making the transition over to Highway, yeah?
Unknown:So I was at freight waves for four years, and it was wonderful. I love my time there, and I love the team, and they put me in a position to be successful and get me into the right doors, right in front of the right people, great mentors. You remember a lot of people. There are great people. The biggest difference is that sonar, I was on the sonar team doing data for Freightways. Sonar is a data vendor selling you data, and there are solutions built off of the data that you can purchase as well. Highway is a solution, not a data vendor. So, you know, no broker comes to highway to buy our data. You come to highway buyer solution and enforce that company wide. That's the biggest difference, I would say, between, like, a freight wave sonar product versus highway SaaS solution versus data provider. Yeah, it's
Blythe Brumleve:all intelligence. Yeah, it's one of those where it highway from, my understanding, is one of those that you it sounds like it's become very pivotal to a broker's day or a carrier state, for
Unknown:sure. It's definitely, it's touched frequently, for sure.
Blythe Brumleve:So what? What's next for highway? What do you guys got, you know, cooking?
Unknown:Yeah, um, there's, there's, there's, there's three kind of big initiatives. I don't know what I'm allowed to talk about, because I'm just a sales guy, yeah, we can save it for later. Yeah, we can say for later. There's three big ones. I think the one that we're like, I posted on LinkedIn about it in response, we were rolling out a carrier product. I. Um, that's free for carriers to vet brokers. Are you talking to the right person, or is this someone in person, the broker? What's their days to pay, their credit, the everything about the broker, but for carriers. So the same highway login, when a carrier logs in the highway now they can see, here's all my current brokers I work with. Let me learn more about them. Make sure I'm doing the right person, or they're signing up to a new broker. Is this the right guy or not? So it's a free product for carriers to vet brokers.
Blythe Brumleve:That's super interesting, because then you're putting the power back into carriers. Well, carriers
Unknown:get hammered by all angles all the time, so we're not going to charge for it. It's right there for you. They're already in the highway network. You're already here while we charge you for doing something you're already doing. Just give them some more benefit.
Blythe Brumleve:Yeah, that's awesome. All right. Well, Reed, I anything else that you feel is important to mention that we haven't already talked
Unknown:about, oh, we I feel like we went all sorts of directions, which is great. I don't know if you want to reach out to us. Read at highway service, at highway support, at highway you can get to a lot of ways. Go to our website, highway.com, and you can get a demo. From there, a lot of information. But
Blythe Brumleve:yeah, yeah, better safe than sorry. Sign up for highway, yeah, thank you. Thanks
Unknown:very much. Yeah. Really appreciate it.
Blythe Brumleve:I hope you enjoyed this episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight, telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B. Subscribe to the show. Sign up for our newsletter and follow our socials over at everything is logistics.com and in addition to the podcast, I also wanted to let y'all know about another company I operate, and that's digital dispatch, where we help you build a better website. Now, a lot of the times, we hand this task of building a new website or refreshing a current one off to a coworker's child, a neighbor down the street or stranger around the world, where you probably spend more time explaining the freight industry than it takes to actually build the dang website. Well, that doesn't happen at Digital dispatch. We've been building online since 2009 but we're also early adopters of AI automation and other website tactics that help your company to be a central place to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit new employees and give potential customers a glimpse into how you operate your business. Our new website builds start as low as$1,500 along with ongoing website management, maintenance and updates starting at $90 a month, plus some bonus freight, marketing and sales content similar to what you hear on the podcast. You can watch a quick explainer video over on digital dispatch.io, just check out the pricing page once you arrive, and you can see how we can build your digital ecosystem on a strong foundation. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you all real soon and go Jags, you?
