The Business Case for Paranoia: Best-Of Cargo Crime & Fraud Prevention

In this best-of episode of Everything is Logistics, we’re building the business case for healthy paranoia in freight. I’m pulling together clips from past conversations with Jonathan Ryan (Overhaul), Reid Clements (Highway), and Mark Funk & Shivrani Narayan (SPI Logistics), plus a breakdown with Grace Sharkey (Orderful) on the current state of cargo crime. From fake carriers and spoofed identities to food-and-beverage loads that “disappear” into the market, this is the stuff that quietly nukes margins while everyone argues over rates.

This episode walks through how fraud actually happens on the ground, what the red flags look like inside your TMS and inbox, and what the best teams are doing to shut it down before a load ever hits the road.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why identity is the real battleground in freight fraud—and how a $300 fake MC can wreck your quarter.
• How shippers, brokers, and carriers are using data from telematics, ELDs, and IoT devices to spot sketchy activity in real time.
• What cargo crime looks like at the agent level: carrier vetting, distress loads, and “oh no” moments that could’ve been prevented.
• Why thieves are shifting hard into food, beverage, and other “easily consumed” loads—and what that means for your contracts and processes.
• Practical steps to tighten carrier selection, build better response playbooks, and protect both freight and drivers.

If you touch freight in any way—shipper, broker, carrier, 3PL, agent—this is your reminder that trust is not a strategy. Paranoia, on the other hand, might just save your freight budget.

Watch the video version of these episodes over on YouTube. 

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Chapters

• 2:02 State of Cargo Crime with Grace Sharkey
• 33:01 Fraud Prevention Tips with SPI Logistics
• 1:29:20 Freight Fraud is up 500% - How Highway Wants to Stop It
• 1:50:19 Overhaul's AI-Powered Fraud Prevention

Transcript

Blythe Brumleve: 0:37

Blythe, welcome back into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers and freight. I am your host, Blythe Milligan, and we are proudly presented by SPI logistics today, we're cutting through the noise, and we're bringing you a best of compilation that tackles the single most requested topic in our community, and that is cargo crime and freight fraud. That's right, this isn't your granddad's truck stop pilferage anymore. We're talking about a multi billion dollar globally surging problem, which is a sophisticated, evolving battle against bad actors using everything from Ai voice cloning to hacked carrier emails, all to steal your high value freight. To understand this landscape, we're pulling together the most critical insights from our conversations with industry heavyweights such as Reed Clemens from Highway, Jonathan Ryan from overhaul, Mark and shiv from SPI logistics fraud department, and then also our favorite freight friend, Grace Sharkey, we are covering how the fraud game has changed, the new technology being used by criminals and the good guys, the early warning signs you need to look for and the non negotiable vetting processes you must adopt, this is pure actionable intelligence from the front lines. So buckle up, because if you're booking freight, you're moving freight, or you're paying for freight, you need to hear this. Let's dive into the modern state of cargo crime. Grace Sharkey is back from Freightways, and we're going to talk about the state of cargo crime in a recent poll that we conducted on Twitter. Very scientific. It's on my personal Twitter account, cargo crime was the top result of the topics that people want to hear more about, and it's one of those topics that I think the industry can't get enough of right now. It was a big topic at the recent freight waves at three conference that you just attended, just I want to give a couple key facts before we kind of dive into it. And it's sort of the state of cargo crime overall. And so a couple of these key facts is that the economic impact is global losses amount to billions, billions annually in losses. It leads to higher insurance premiums and security costs. The next key fact is that it causes supply chain disruption, which, of course, all of us are very familiar with. And it causes delays and stock shortages. Damages customer trust and brand reputation. And then the common types of cargo crime are theft from vehicles and facilities. The goods are actually stolen from the trucks and warehouses and reports. Another type of cargo crime is hijackings, where vehicles are forcibly taken over to steal the cargo. Then there's also fraudulent pickups, the use of fake documents or identities to illegally collect cargo. And then the cyber crime aspect, which is hacking logistic systems to manipulate the shipment information. Little bit of historical context, because why not. But in ancient times, bandits and pirates targeted trade routes to conduct their cargo crime activities. Then during the Industrial Revolution, there was a rise in cargo theft with expanded railroads and shipping, and then in the 20th century, criminals have adapted to containerization and the globalization of trade using those different technology solutions. So Grace, you were just at f3 there was, I think highway took the number one overall spot, which they help prevent types of freight fraud. So do you think that this was freight fraud or cargo crime. Do you think that that was sort of the, I guess, the consistency of what makes up the top 25 in freight tech right now? Or is it, you know, just cargo crime or freight fraud prevention is kind of coming into its own. Would you say

Grace Sharkey: 4:15

no, I think it's becoming more I think technology, in a way, has helped it come almost surface a little bit more, right? Like realizing, okay, there's ways for us to to track these individuals, like the fact that not only are they using cyber security against us, now we can start to actually kind of track this stuff and speak up. I think that's part of it too. People are actually speaking up about these losses because they are high. I mean, it was in 2021 or 22 the average loss during these crimes is like over $200,000 so, I mean, that's depending on what insurance covers. Like that could be a huge hit for participants in the supply chain as well, let alone just the loss of the shipper in particular. So I think we're just seeing more and more in these values getting higher and higher. Right? We see inflation. Inflation is going to mean that also the cargo is worth more, and it's just becoming a bigger deal. And what's interesting, I will say about like the highway making that number one spot is like highway is trying to get us back to a point where we can just start to book carriers and not be afraid of what could potentially happen. Right for them. I was speaking with with Michael Caine at the event. It's like he, I don't want to say he doesn't like the the the fraud aspect. Of how highway is presented. But for him, it's it's like, the reason that highway exists is to move on from that conversation, so the industry can get to a point where it's like these, these mishaps are not happening as frequently because technology has vetted most of these, these, these losers out. If that makes sense, it's kind of like something that Amazon works on, right, like making sure there's not these third party individual sellers who are selling crap or just fake goods. So can we improve so that every person who purchases something off Amazon doesn't also have to check reviews to make sure the product is good as well. So that gets me excited that it's, it's that they're looking to kind of move past that discussion. But in general, we'll get into this too. I think the the 25 list shows just like issues that we're, we're getting through as an industry as well this past year. That's, that's fascinating. It's, I actually want to be in the timing of this episode, throw some some extra Thanksgiving stats your way. Shout out to cargo net, who came out with statistics for lost value during the week of Thanksgiving. So for them, this will be the Tuesday review of last year, Tuesday to the Monday after Thanksgiving. Last year, we had a total loss value of over $7.83 million in product, with the average loss being$159,000 biggest states to to experience that was California by landslide, then Illinois and Texas with over 174 theft reports. With food and beverage actually being the biggest commodity type than household goods and electronics. So this week is the this is the this could be the Christmas week for all those fraudsters throughout the next couple of days as well, going into next week too. And so for everyone out there booking stuff for over the weekend, clearly, make sure you're using good carriers, since this episode is coming out afterwards, same thing over the Christmas weeks, you want to make sure good, good carriers are moving that stuff, especially if you're moving things that potentially will be gifts or electronics, right? Like that stuff is going to be really, really keen to watch. Make sure drivers are are parking in good places that aren't getting themselves into sketchy parking situations, and that stuff's getting delivered, okay, too. But it's definitely a problem, and it's it's not even just like a truck problem. We're seeing it in retail as well, with with shrinkage numbers like representing a lot of that loss, warehouse to warehouse, right? Just things being either lost or taken off pallets. So there's so many different ways that we're seeing this type of crime. Cyber security is another one, and I think that's a big part of it too. It's just becoming so like sophisticated in the avenues that that these fraudsters are taking, that we have to be creative as an industry to also stop it.

Blythe Brumleve: 8:40

Is it something that with a lot of these precautions? Are you taking the same precautions this month or during the holidays as you are the rest of the year? Or is it because it is peak season and you're doing so much more volume that sometimes, you know, just human nature, you're kind of, maybe skipping a few of those. I guess prevention strategies is that, is that maybe what's happening more of

Grace Sharkey: 9:08

I would say so, I mean, I think if you're, let's say you're, if you're moving truckloads throughout the year for Samsung. I mean, that would be the type of fray I would watch, probably with the same caution, every single year just because, or every single day because it is high value and things that people are going to love to take off a truck. But I think over the next couple of weeks, just knowing that we're going to see high volumes of foods and household goods moving around the country, it's something that people should be considering more of and I think with that too is just clearly like the locations that drivers are really stopping at is a big one. I would be more concerned with, you know, a truck stop and a weird part of town during this time of the year than than just in a random March date or something like that, right? So it does depend. I think if you're moving that high value stuff, you probably clearly should be focused on this all year round. But just knowing that, you know it's it's like, for instance, a couple of years ago, we lost a lot of power here in Lansing, Michigan. And for me, I wouldn't normally be nervous on not having power, but when I know that everyone around me knows that I probably have gifts underneath my tree, then I'm a little bit more concerned without having power. So I think it's just a little bit of that, right? It's like, okay, we know that stores are going to be stocking up. We know that really good. Toys and things that are popular are going to be coming to these stores. How do we get our hands on them?

Blythe Brumleve: 10:42

And I would imagine, what does it? Can a TMS in, like a out of the box. TMS help prevent freight fraud or some of these situations from happening. I know Thai software, you know, has integration partners with Highway, with, you know, a couple of other other vendors. But I'm curious as to what maybe like a tech stack looks like for a modern brokerage to prevent as much as possible.

Grace Sharkey: 11:12

I would say a lot of the bigger players, larger volume participants, I've heard are using pretty much everything they can get their hands on, because they all do stuff a little bit differently, right? Like, I think highway is a little bit more of, kind of almost, sort of like a background check of who you're using today, almost like, for me, like highway feels a little bit more like a credit check, if that makes sense,

Blythe Brumleve: 11:39

right into their VIN number, I believe, right?

Grace Sharkey: 11:42

Yes, yeah. So it's like, more of like the history this establishment behind the company you're using, where like and offering like verified carrier fronts over there, right? That one is almost more of like a of like a plaid for like, banking services, right? It's like verifying that yes, that account is yours, or yes that vid number and that driver are are together, right? So I think with that being said, people are kind of are being creative and how they're using the different products based on what they're good at doing and and what they're showcasing as well, I would say, for the smaller players, clearly highway, I think would be a good one for them to look into. But I also just think, in general, how you're training individuals, like, if you're a really small brokerage and you're like, I can't afford any of these tools. I mean, I get it. The market's been where it's been at. Like, if you're using carrier 411, and just creating really good operations that are being held to a standard. There's ways that you can, of course, I think better protect your your freight as well, right? So before you're if you're onboarding new carrier, are you calling the insurance company and making sure that insurance is active? That's something this technology could do in a second, but it's also something that takes a couple of minutes, that, again, probably is worth the risk seeing that you're a small brokerage and probably can't take $150,000 loss that potentially isn't covered, right? So just being like aware of what is in your system, what what information is there, verifying that also, like at this, you can easily humans, right? We can watch for more spam emails. When you're getting truck lists over, are you checking to see if it says it's universal truckload, that the email isn't like, USA dot universal truckload.com, or something like that, right? Like a little off to where you're like, okay, is this the person I think I'm talking to? So I think even for the smaller players out there, it's not so much of like having to invest in this technology today. But what are you doing, just in your operations, to create a culture that's looking to mitigate more fraud within your your four walls as well, right? So I would say you're right. Most TMS at least have integrations into these systems, or are working on some really great integrations with some of those legacy providers. But worst case, on a human level, I think there's discussions that should be happening across the board at a brokerage of any size, just because that, at the end of the day, that human element, I think, is huge, right? Like being able to see some of these, see those issues, and say, You know what, maybe, maybe I shouldn't buy my CEO 15 gift cards. And, I mean, he doesn't want maybe that email looks a little suspicious. Yeah, exactly. Oh, I haven't heard from Craig fuller ever via text message, but now he wants me to to buy him 30 gift cards from Home Depot. Like, well, maybe I'll, I'll ask, I'll call, like, a quick phone call before I do that.

Blythe Brumleve: 14:49

But I remember I so I I've worked at a couple different brokerages, and so one that I worked at right before I started up Brumleve brands, I was in charge of carrier relations, and I was taught by a broker on how to do it. I never asked any of these questions. It was them just sending me what the carrier information was. I checked carrier forward one just to make sure that they had a profile on there, and if they had a profile on there, they were immediately added to the system like there were no checks and balances that were being done. Frankly, because I did not know that I had to do all of these things. I'm pretty sure it was probably just a broker trying to, you know, get their carrier approved as soon as possible, and didn't want to train me on what, you know, the fraud that made. Be looked like, but I think that that was maybe also a different time, you know this, I'm talking like six or seven years ago, so this is definitely a while ago, and I don't think any of these tools really existed, or even, you know, fraud, to this extent, existed. So it's, I think it's a good example of how this industry has evolved so rapidly because of how criminals have evolved so rapidly and that they are using these digital systems. And I, when I say digital systems, I mean, you know, a fake website, a fake email address, or not even like a fake email addresses, but there's, there was one, like fake news site that was created to look exactly like the Guardian's website, except when they made the website, it was like the U of spelling out Guardian was the Latin version of spelling out Guardian, and so you wouldn't catch it if you didn't know that that it had the little you know, symbol on the top of it. And so it was built to look exactly like the Guardian, and even in the domain name, the email address. And so these fraudsters are getting very sophisticated. So if you're not closely paying attention, if it's happening, you know, in this area of the world, it only makes sense that it's going to happen. You know, to to your area of the world, meaning your business, how you operate it. And for a lot of these, I guess, slower to adopt technology industries, which I would put freight in that regard, I would put construction in that regard, where they're trying to adopt new technology, especially over the last five years, but it is still very much an older industry, like a legacy industry, and so for a lot of folks, it's tough for them to evolve. It's tough for them to change, but you're going to have to it's, it's, it's the the way that business goes. You have to evolve, especially in the the digital world we live in.

Grace Sharkey: 17:34

Well, I think there's a special that Oprah did on AI a couple, maybe a month or two ago. And one big thing I took from that, that I felt like related to this industry, is like, especially when it comes to AI tools and things of that nature. AI is like one of those technologies, one of the only technologies that have come to fruition or become mainstream, but have, like, beat beats the consumer to regulation. So, like, the government hasn't been able to regulate the technology as as quickly as it's becoming popular, right? And I think we kind of see that in freight as well, where it's like this, this fraud has happened so quickly through the technology that we're using that now we're seeing the FMCSA kind of respond to the to all of this, these issues after the fact, which makes it really messy and almost slower to to resolve Some of this crime, compared to being maybe responsive to the site cyber security issues, right? Like, for instance, like you before, you could use a online address right to to register your truck. Now, I clearly that was never thought about in a more digital world, but now we're seeing them say, you know, you have to come on site, and it has to be a physical location in order to register for us. So they're being a little bit reactive to it, which clearly isn't helping it. But again, I don't think anyone would have expected to see technology almost explode at the percentage point that it did right Excel up to the point that we're at now. So it's going to be interesting to watch. I think, clearly, I don't, I don't think we're going to go into 25 and people ignore the freight fraud type of or freight mitigation technology that's out there. But in general, I think something we'll talk about too, is like, I just think we're going to see a lot of action between tech companies, maybe merging together who have similar goals, but could, could work better provide a better experience for users, if, if together instead of apart.

Blythe Brumleve: 19:52

So I remember on a I think we did an episode about a year ago on covering cargo crime. And at that time, a lot of food goods and drinks were being stolen, and that was what was being targeted by these criminal organizations. And it was making it really, really tough for, you know, prosecutors or investigators to find out who was conducting this because for those commodities in particular, the evidence is gone, and it's they drink it or they eat it, and so it just goes like that, where, like, I think it was an order of pistachios, where it was, like, a million dollars, it may be more than that, of pistachios that were stolen, and you can never track that down, because there is no, like, specific barcode. Whereas something like electronics, or, you know, I think it's all on this list. So electronics, pharmaceuticals, apparel and other consumer goods are high risk items, but they also have a high, a higher recovery than, say, some of these like perishable items. So I thought that that was interesting, too. And then I think it's not a US problem yet, or it's not happening in the US system yet. But there was one company that I was talking to specifically about this, and they have, like, insurance monitoring, and they, I think they're, I believe they're global, and so in the South America, they, I was asking, what's the difference between, like, cargo crime in the US versus cargo crime in other countries? And he mentioned that in Brazil, that for a lot of these fraud activities that happen, these kids are being targeted in like middle and high school, and so they're being recruited at such a young age that, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna, you know, give you some money. We, you know, they start becoming friends with them, or making them feel like they're friends with them in middle school and in high school. And so then that way, they've kind of coaxed them into this friendly relationship. And then they pay for them to start working in logistics, working at ports. And then that's their in and then that's how they get into these different bigger organizations, is that they almost like are recruiting or hiring spies from a very young age. And that's how they get into the system in Brazil versus in the US, where it's much more just highly targeted locations such as the port, such as, I think we've all working in freight. We've all seen those that footage of, you know, the trains coming out from the Port of LA or the Port of Long Beach, and, you know, the the trains are so slow moving, or they just kind of stay there, and you can willingly just walk up and, you know, unlock a cart on a train. I think that's the right phrase for it. I don't know what the right phrase is, but you guys know what I'm talking about. Yeah, free car, yes, yes, a car, not a cart, but they'll just open it up, and there's all these boxes just thrown everywhere, just people just opening it up and opening up people's packages and taking what they want, and so that that's a little bit of, I guess, of a cultural difference is that it's much more targeted in specific areas, like warehouses and ports, versus in Brazil, what they've seen in their data is that they're almost recruiting people at a very young age. And, you know, I don't want to say seducing them, maybe like molding them in a way that they're going to eventually work for them. Grooming now, grooming them. Yeah, grooming them for when they do go work for these bigger logistics companies that they already have an in. And so I just find all of this, like endlessly fascinating about not just the fraud prevention, but what are you monitoring that's going on in different countries, and how that's different. Like Mexican drivers, for example, they are told, like, don't drive at night and don't pull over on the side of the road. Like you, you make sure you are fueled up and ready to go whenever you have your shipment, and you do not stop, you do not pull over, you keep going. And so that's another difference, of like, a different area of the world, and how they're trying to combat it, or they're trying to prevent it from happening. And so just, it's overall interesting. And so anything else you think is important to bring up about cargo crime?

Grace Sharkey: 24:07

I just, I think, well, clearly, you know, we started a new newsletter here at freightwaves on it, so you guys can check that out. If you go to freightwaves.com click on newsletters, you'll see fraud watch on there as well, and I'll share a link with you Blythe for that. But it's, it's, if we put out an article on it, it goes bonkers. It's, it's what's on everyone's mind. And I think it's because it's just so it's so broad, right on what exactly that fraud is. I mean, it can be anything from poor business decisions, right? It can be anything from that to stealing cargo to retail fraud. And so I think, because it's just so many avenues and ways of committing the crime, again, that kind of goes towards why it's going to be so hard to stop too. And I think another part of it too is just like we everyone who's been in the industry knows the checks and balances that would need to be done in order to fully stop it. And with that, is also a lengthy discussion on, you know, how operations need to change and how much, almost like, companies need to be booking shipments in a different manner. So with that big of a change issue needed in order to stop it, or at least, you know, halt it where it's at, I think that's why it's such a talk of a of the town, because people just, not only how do we fix it, but like, where these. Problems. Where's my risk, and how do we as an entity, prepare ourselves for that risk as well?

Blythe Brumleve: 25:43

All great points before we close out the topic, I wanted to bring this image up on the screen. What happened in India where meth sees from a Mirena mese boat cost more than the aircraft carrier V grant. It was built at a cost of $2.49 billion so the met that they seized from this shipment was worth more than the carrier that it was built with. And we're talking about street value here for the drug not necessarily. There's a debate going on in the Reddit comments. First one is the first comment they said, Damn, that's a lot of missing teeth, referring to the enormous amount of meth that was caught on this boat. I mean, if you're just listening to the show it, what would you say? 123448, I'm bad at math, but I would say probably like 100 looks like cement bags full of meth, which is a lot of it's a lot of myth, but there was a debate going on in the comments about, you know, what are we place these values of, and that when cargo crime happens like this, are we attributing value of the wholesale value, or are we attributing the retail value? So there's a little bit, I think, of gamesmanship going on with police departments and things

Grace Sharkey: 27:00

like that, and meth is different, because it's like, you're not gonna, if someone steals your math, you know, you're not gonna report that. Yeah, the police, you know. But I it's funny you bring that up, because most insurance companies don't cover the product value right after the selling, the selling value, right? They'll for them, it's, how much does it cost to actually make as a unit? So I used to get into that argument all the time, especially, like moving a lot of steel and things like that. If that, if ever got wet, you know, it's they'd always want, well, I was going to sell it for this, so that's our loss. It's like, no, that's, it's not what you're selling it for. It's for what it's actually valued at at that moment, in terms of just like being a product. So yeah, sometimes you're gonna even lose that margin too, which makes the loss even more heavy.

Blythe Brumleve: 27:53

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Grace Sharkey: 28:53

I think, well, one would they find the apple tag? I think it's a big one at some point, it would solve a lot of issues. I mean, it's, it's visibility issues too, yeah, I think I would, I would assume it's probably a little bit of just, like time, and then, like, just, you know, hopefully there are trackers and things like that. I think there are. I mean, I just wrote about a tive tracker that helped FBI with a special case. So I think there are tracking providers that could help with this. But I think another part of the problem is they're just so sophisticated that they know and maybe to even look for those, or sense those out right. So that could possibly be one. But a lot of this, too is, like on the retail side, like just, you know, someone grabbing boxes off a pallet, so kind of stuff like that, where you might not even a tag, might not help you with it. It's, it's kind of that, like in between stage that's not helpful or more difficult to put your finger on. So again, that's that's a cool part about all this is, like, there's multiple ways this can happen. I mean, it could even be something as small as, like, you take a load and the carrier says, Hey, I need a fuel advance in order to go pick up. And you send a fuel advance, and then they never pick up, right? Like that. The Apple tax not going to save you on that one. So it's just it's so there are situations I think tech like that could help it, and I would hope that most of those companies are using some type of tracker. But I think there's also an element of like within the booking process, within even the paperwork that's coming through that that adds that little spicy element. To it?

Blythe Brumleve: 30:38

Yeah, I think it's definitely something that it's very like, dependent on the type of commodity. If it's a bunch, you're shipping a load a bunch of flat screen televisions, then you're probably going to invest in a lot of different Apple tax but to, I guess, to point to our earlier conversation that you know those typically have serial numbers. They have barcodes on them. So they're if they are stolen, there's a high, a higher likelihood that they could be tracked back, versus like a drink shipment, where an apple tag is just probably not worth it to add that kind of tracking functionality or that kind of visibility into your shipment. So there's a lot of things at play, and hopefully the combination of prevention, monitoring and then insurance in case shit does happen, I think is probably going to be what the the business case or the tech stack looks like. And I don't even know if that's necessarily tech, but it's like tech plus human involvement.

Grace Sharkey: 31:34

Yeah, you know someone you probably should invite on the show Andrew Smith from circle logistics that he was a part of my second newsletter. I watched him speak on how he was using both carrier, sure and happy robot to eliminate those calls from even coming into the business and tracking those individuals and figuring out who to do not use within their system. And he gave us a really detailed account of not only how the technology works, but how he's implemented it with his employees to make sure that, because you know, you could have certain checks and balances within the day, if your employees are going to go around him, it's like, pretty much useless. So just creative, interesting incentives to make sure the technology is being used correctly, and then executing those those plans purposefully, like has really worked for him. So maybe someone you could have on the show too to discuss it. But I think it's a lot more than just like you bought highway now it's fixed, but it's it's a problem. I again, I think we go into this next year and we still are having issues with it as well.

Blythe Brumleve: 32:49

Yeah, you probably, I mean, given the historical, you know, perspective, we're always going to be facing this, criminals are always going to be evolving, and it's just a game of like playing catch up with each other. Welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I am Blythe Milligan. We are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and for this episode, we're going to be talking about freight fraud, because freight fraud and cargo theft have surged globally in recent years, evolving from simple truck stop heights into sophisticated scams that exploit digital tools organized cargo crime is hitting record levels in North America and really across the world amid a volatile economy. It's a $1 billion problem annually and climbing with ripple effects, costing businesses and consumers an estimated 15 to $35 billion each year. In this episode, we're going to be welcoming in Mark and shiv, a couple folks from SBI logistics, to talk about what they've been seeing and how their agents are experiencing in preventing and battling the modern modern day cargo crime with a strong focus on the carrier selection process. So Marcus, Shiv, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome into the show, and I guess let's start Shiv with you first. What is your sort of role within SPI Can you kind of give us, like a high level overview?

Unknown: 34:14

So high level, I would say, I definitely deal with claims all the time. My title is Operations Manager. There was a point I was like, just claim supervisor, because I basically got pulled into this role, and now it's just gone into just such a much busier role than it was when I first started. It's just crazy to see, but high level, definitely day to day claims and distressed load situations is what I handle and deal with. And then just overseeing carrier vetting and carrier onboarding,

Blythe Brumleve: 34:46

that's going to be a fantastic resume in order to battle this. Yeah, or not, battle this, I guess, combat this, this problem of what we're facing with freight fraud. And then Mark, I've listened to a couple of interviews with you on on Chris jolly's podcast. Shout out to him, because you guys had some great conversations. Can you kind of give us that high level overview of what your day to day looks like at SPI Well, sure.

Unknown: 35:07

So first of all, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Blythe, as far as my title, my role here, I'm the director of carrier procurement, and with that, comes with several different facets of the job, you know, reaching out to carriers, trying to make sure that the carriers that we're bringing on board are who they say they are. They can meet the criteria that we need. But then also kind of diving down in some of our carrier tools and a lot of the tools that we use and we actually put into our tech stack here for, you know, our agents and or. Potential agents that we're talking to incorporate various fraud detection methods, spoofing verifications, things like that. So I'll get in line and talk to a lot of different vendors and whatnot to make sure that they're offering matches what what we want. And I'll take that and work with our carrier base and interagents, you know, to make sure that we're meeting their needs and the needs of the industry.

Blythe Brumleve: 36:03

And as you know, I kind of was doing research for this episode. That just feels like there's so many tools out there, because I did. I did a very, very brief stint of carrier relations about a decade ago before someone else, more responsible took over. You know that that role and responsibilities, but the extent of it at that point was just, you know, let's see if the carrier is active in carrier 411, and then if they are good, that's the setup. Process is complete. Let me get the carrier packet, and we're good to go. How has that and Mark, I'll stay with you for a second. How has that process, I guess, evolved over the last decade, where it's not as simple as just going to carry your 4011, anymore. You have to utilize several different tools within that vetting process.

Unknown: 36:49

Yeah, you know, it's not your dad's fraud process anymore, right? So, and you hit the nail on the head. I mean, there's so many different pieces of technology and things out there that, you know, we didn't have, you know, many years ago, or even a few years ago, the days of just checking care 401, are pretty much gone. You've got different vetting platforms that have have introduced into the market. You've got highway. You got even our MIS they've stepped up their their offering. You've got my carrier, packet carrier, sure, and the list goes on. But you know, what we've seen is you can't really bring everything down to just one tool. You know, you kind of got to use a combination of different tools and different things to make it as foolproof as possible. The problem is, once you think you've got everything locked down and where it needs to be, you know, the bad actors find a way to exploit any weakness that you have. And you know, if I can since, since we're talking about technology, a lot of times the technology that's created to make it easier for us as three pls or whatnot, is, is actually, is being used against us. And one of the things I'll talk about here, you know, because everybody likes to tell AI, you know, AI this, and AI that, right? And everybody talks about AI, but, you know, here's the reality situation. They have things out there that are called Voice cloning technology, right from AI, and I'll tell you, Blythe, some of this technology is so far advanced that it needs between three to five seconds of your voice pattern to replicate your actual voice. And are employing this, they're actually putting this in use. So if they call a an agent, or they call a broker, and they get, you know, hey, I'm calling about your load from somewhere, somewhere, and that agent or that broker says, Well, I don't have a load from here to here. I've got to look now, they've captured a lot of voice, and they can put that together and from there, and there have been that that that's happened using that type of technology. So technology is good and bad, but it's not just one tech stack anymore. You have to mix it together, and that's what we do here.

Blythe Brumleve: 39:06

Yeah, definitely, I have had the conversation with my parents on we have to have some kind of like a safe word for all of us to use the podcaster. You know, I people could clone me, and, you know, 30 seconds having access to video and audio and all of that. And the scams are getting sophisticated, even for parents, where it sounds like somebody is impersonating your child in order to get something out of you. So I can only imagine of what it's being done at scale in the commercial world. Shiv, I'll go to you what, maybe what, same question, what? I guess advances in sort of the vetting process, or the, I guess the reassurance process. Have you seen evolve in sort of the the carrier side of things?

Unknown: 39:52

I think a lot of it for us. Just like Mark said, definitely not just looking at 411, we have to use multiple different platforms to look at it. We also have to really make sure that we're not sharing this information with other actors or like carriers and things like that. We can't just send screenshots of all this stuff, because that's exactly how people know. Like now the kind of technology we are, you know, using in order to verify care as much as possible? So there's a lot more rules in place from when I started with SPF five years ago, I would say one is verifying phone numbers, verifying email addresses, making sure, even in our internal system, we can't just, you know, send it to any email address that is just given to. Us over the phone, there's a lot more verification and like each step of the way. And I think even you know, highway has to do their part as well when it comes to that. But for us, it's multiple different platforms. It's not just just the one as it was before. Yeah, I

Blythe Brumleve: 40:55

think that it's just, it's almost like more technology, more problems, but then you still have to have sort of that human aspect of it where. And I think Mark, with one of your conversations with Chris, you made a great point along the lines of, you want to, I think you mentioned asking the carrier on the phone what the weather is like, and while you're talking to them, doing a Google search of what the weather is like, where they're located, just to see if they're if that's accurate. So it involves present day, more of like a blend between the technology solutions, and then also just a little bit of, you know, instinctiveness.

Unknown: 41:32

Yeah, sure. It's anything you can do to kind of introduce that. And a lot of times when you're talking just through a normal flow conversation, hey, where are you at right now? Talking about the weather. Another thing you can do that I've used in the past too, let's say, let's say you're talking to the carrier looking to pick up a load Cincinnati. Well, hey, how did Bengals do last night? Or, how did the Reds do last night? Did you see the game? I didn't check the game where? And you start having this conversations now. Ai again. You know the way they're advancing. It's quick to pull those things up. So there's different ways you can say things. You know, it used to be back in the day when you were really, really unsure. Send me a picture of you holding up a number in front of your camp. But AI, you can go in and say, Hey, type this and put this there. AI still has a little bit of problems when it, when it's trying to do fingers and whatnot, but it's, it's evolving very quickly, but those little, those little tactics you can get to help out, I think, I think shipper, and this is maybe where you're going to go a little bit more too, is having the shipper participate in some of the fraud and risk mitigation efforts is key nowadays to where in the past, and I say past several years ago, that's kind of frowned upon, but now you really gotta get the shippers involved. They have to know who's picking it up and and expect who's going to pick it up as well.

Blythe Brumleve: 42:45

Now, in the intro, we talked a little bit about, or I mentioned briefly about how this is, you know, a billion dollar problem, and it's growing. It's costing, you know, taxpayers, anywhere from 15 to 30 billion I believe I'm curious is, are we just talking about freight fraud more and we're more aware about it, or has this kind of trends? Is it just more symbolic to we're just spending more, there's more freight movements. So of course, things are going to be happening more like, what is, I guess, sort of the big picture view of freight fraud?

Unknown: 43:19

Yeah, sure. So theft and freight fraud has has definitely increased, yeah, obviously, with social media and things like that, we're going to hear about it more. But when you look at the report, number of cargo thefts, things like that, if you look at cargo, cargo nets, information and data, it's up significantly. You know, it's up 40 something percent, 43% year over year from last year and then the year before that was like 70 something percent. So it's definitely, definitely increased. Yeah, here's another thing too. You know, freight theft used to just be straight cargo theft, right, where it was just pilferage. Somebody breaks into your truck at it at a lot, and they break and take, you know, four or five packages out and they leave. It's not like that anymore. The number one type of cargo theft is actually strategic, and that is based upon, you know, technology, and being able to perpetrate those, those thefts through, through the use of technology, I mean, so that it's definitely up. And when you look at some of the other different crimes, and where it's happening is actually increasing too. Obviously, you've got the big states, you got California, you got Illinois, you got Texas and and Florida. You have it as well. But we're seeing a significant increase in thefts and corridors coming out of California, right? If nothing else, thieves are very good at their ROI Right? So they steal, they steal this cargo in California or something. And you know, why is it increasing in the next state over because that's the first place they can stop to get gas. It's cheaper to get gas over there. So it is increasing. I mean, Shiv, I don't know if you're seeing it on your end. As far as the number of incidents, yes, 100% and I think everything is getting much more complicated as well. When it comes to that reasoning and a lot of it, I think the number one, one like reasoning right now is hacked email addresses, actual carriers, legitimate carriers, and them having their email addresses either actually hacked or supposedly hacked, but we're actually sending recons to valid email addresses, and loads have been getting stolen. And that's the really interesting part right now. There's some sort of strategy that's going on when it comes to that. And I think I just also the shipper, the shipper, they. That Mark said is that shippers not, unfortunately, loading the carriers that are actually supposed to arrive there. When the broker advises, which is another thing we, you know, had an issue with, they'll do their due diligence, they take the license of the driver down, they'll take down their MC and all of that. But there's some sort of miscommunication when it comes to Hey, broker said that this is the carrier that's supposed to arrive, but they don't check to see that that carrier actually arrived, and then they load this legitimate carrier, and then that legitimate carrier was hired by a fraudulent broker to take it to a warehouse somewhere. So I think that is one of the biggest things we're seeing right now, too. Unfortunately. Yeah, you know, to touch base on that some of the things that I'm hearing from some of the people that talk to in the industry, in the industry, it's somebody who used a dispatching service, or they had former dispatchers who would work for them. So they have access to a cares email, just, you know, an at Gmail, public domain address, and then they leave, right and then they go, they're a bad actor, and they go, maybe working with another bad actor, and they still have those, those logging credentials, right? And then they monitor freight, and they solicit freight, and then, if they work out a load, negotiate the ability to take a load. What, what they're doing is inside the carrier's email address. They're deleting those, those those emails. They'll put a rule up and a 40 forward those emails to, oh, hey, if you get an email from SBI, whatever, go ahead and send that to John Doe at Gmail and then delete this email. So a legitimate carrier has no idea that that another, another entity is using their email and then deleting the emails and forwarding it, right? So, I mean, there's good business practices that need to happen. So if somebody leaves that carrier, they should change their email address password, right? They should do, you know, authentication through the phone. I mean, there's different things they could and should do to protect themselves, but then also to protect the industry as a whole, and we're not seeing that in general. I mean, I don't, I don't say everybody, just in

Blythe Brumleve: 47:43

general, it almost feels like this, you know, it's a cat and mouse game that you're just, it just never ends, and they're going to continuously get better, and you're going to have to try to figure out, I would have the hardest time even trying to figure out that someone is receiving my emails and deleting them, and I don't even know what would be the first step to even figure out that process is or or that potential fraud issue is, are there? What are those early warning signs that maybe something has happened?

Unknown: 48:13

Well, I what you can do is, is one, change your password on a regular basis, right? Set up authentication where you when you sign on, you have to sign on through your phone too. So you got two places to do that, right? Another thing too is you want to check your deleted folder a lot of times, because they'll just send it and they'll put it and let it stack up and delete a folder, and then they delete it that way. But I would just be on a constant process of changing your password and setting up it these, these public domains. It's really, it's really easy for that to happen. So, you know, kind of setting up your own email with your own company name. It's cheaper, it's more efficient to do it through, you know, at Gmail or whatnot. So those are things. So I would definitely change my email on an ongoing basis. Lot of times it's just a former employee who hacked it, or they click a link. I'm sorry, should have you. Oh, yeah, no, I was gonna say I think also you should be able to check to see where your emails logged in from, or logged into, what devices your email is logged into. So maybe, you know, you delayed it a little bit. Somebody left the company, but you haven't changed your password. If you do go change your password, maybe check to see where was it last logged in? Is it still logged into a different device? And then also maybe check to see if there's rule set up. I'm not 100% sure if that's something you can check, but I assume you can check to see if there is a forwarding rule set up for something specific, and delete all of those. But that's kind of like a thing in case, you know, you don't change it in time, or you don't, yeah, I think after doing that, also do that due

Blythe Brumleve: 49:44

diligence and Shiva. I'll stay with you for a second. Is there any, I guess maybe, like glaring commodities that are being targeted for these, you know, fraud efforts.

Unknown: 49:57

Honestly, there is, like, definitely in the industry. For us, I think we've seen it for several, several things like we've seen We've seen it with Legos, we've seen it with protein powder. We've seen it with olives. Like, for us, I find that it's often there's no like, specific thing. And of course, like, you have your copper, you know you have your you gotta be careful with steel, things like that. But in the industry, it is household items and beverages, which is what I believe, if I'm correct, mark the top commodity, targeted commodities, right? Absolutely, you know what's something like. That it's, it doesn't stay around very long, right? So if it's food or commodity or something like that, you know you're gonna, you're gonna eat it, or you're gonna, you're gonna disperse it through the network. So it's not gonna, it's not a durable good that's gonna hang around forever,

Blythe Brumleve: 50:51

yeah, because they have the serial numbers attached to it, it's probably easier to trace, easier to track, versus, you know, something like protein powder, which would probably be gone and, you know, 30 days tops, or removing the labels, there's no, you know, as far as I know, there's no, like, you know, I don't know VIN number for a protein powder. That would just be probably too complicated, yeah.

Unknown: 51:12

And, you know, you get, you get different cartels involved now, so it's, it's a full scale, you know, global situation, you got different cartels who will target certain commodities. You know, maybe there's a cartel out of out of Eastern Europe that, for whatever reason, likes to target copper loads, right? You know, maybe there's a cartel out of India that likes to look at, you know, household goods, and it's just wherever they can get it fenced where they're used to getting it fenced from. And it used to be in a day too, where you could bust a cargo ring. And it would take 678, months before they got, you know, more people involved to do it. Now, when they take down a cargo theft operation you've got, they're just flying in another group of people are spinning up another cell, in some cases, the next day.

Blythe Brumleve: 52:02

And is all this happening in the United States, or is it a North America problem? I mean, I know in in my show notes, I had that it's a global issue, but I'm, I'm curious as to if there's anything that's, I guess, isolated to the United States, or maybe there's some, some varying case, or maybe it's isolated to North America. What are some of the, I guess, the location trends that we're seeing?

Unknown: 52:24

Well, you're always having cargo theft worldwide. There is a significant increase in North America, and I think that's because, you know, there's, there's a lot of freight moving in the United States, and also there's, there's a lot more of an infrastructure to report this. But in Mexico, there's a lot of theft that happens in Mexico. And if thefts that happen in Mexico or a lot more violent than in the United States, it's happening after the truck is loaded. And you can go out, and you can see these types of things when you go to these conferences and whatnot. You can look them up as well. And they will follow a truck down the road, and they will box the truck and pull it over. And it used to be in a day, they would have the drivers sit on the side of the road while they empty out the truck. Now it's easy for them just to shoot the driver, no witnesses, and it's a scary situation for these drivers in Mexico. And there's a certain corridor in Mexico where it's a crazy number. It's and this is, don't go hold me to this number, but it's something like 40% of the freight is, it's stolen. It's, it's insane. You know, Scott Cornell is a very, very keen individual. And if you, if you don't know Scott, you may want to touch base with him. I mean, that guy, he's just a phenomenal person, and he'll give you the right numbers. Yeah, oh yeah. Absolutely loves

Blythe Brumleve: 53:38

now i shiv, I saw you. You nodding your your head along with with that. Do you have any, I guess, maybe war stories to share with us of some incidences that have happened in Mexico?

Unknown: 53:49

Well, that's what, exactly what Mark is talking about. I remember seeing a video that they showed at a conference like, literally, where, you know, these drivers go in and they stop the truck and they're, like, shooting at the truck. So that's what I does exactly. That probably saw the same video, because it was Scott Cornell's conference, basically. But yes, that's why I was like, yep, that's exactly what happens in Mexico. Unfortunately, it's really scary. So I guess I at least we're lucky in that sense. But definitely, yeah,

Blythe Brumleve: 54:22

because I, my first thought process goes to like, well, how why would you even become a truck driver in Mexico? Like, what if this is, you know, if upwards of 40% of all the freight is being stolen and your life is at risk?

Unknown: 54:34

Why in a specific corridor I want to classify that, you know, right, but still, yes, why would you run that corridor?

Blythe Brumleve: 54:42

Mean, the insurance costs have to be insane for that route alone, I would think so. It's a lot of, you know, additional maybe, like, you know, waterfall effects that happen, you know, from one terrible incident that happens after that and what in situations like that? What can be done?

Unknown: 55:01

Anything, you know, something like that, I don't think, well, you could have armed transport that's going with it. But a lot of times, you have the cartel involved. And there's listeners corruption all over the world. But in certain situations, in certain areas, you you have cartel who in working with local officials, right? And, and, you know, there's agreements made, and you know, we're, hey, listen, we're going to pull over this many trucks, and maybe there's agreements where they don't do any harm to the driver, maybe rough them up a little bit, right? There's a lot of things happening. And I think there's, you. In Mexico, you have to, you have to really look at the governments, and you have to look at the cartel, and there's a lot of corruption here in the United States when it comes to cargo theft. How do you, how do you prevent some of that stuff? Well, that's, that's what we're talking about here, betting with the carrier, carrier having security, the shipper, knowing who's coming in the loading, you know, maybe, hey, ask for this guy driver's license. In some cases, that can still be, still be fake. You know, some of the very sophisticated, I say sophisticated, but, you know, maybe more aware. Maybe that's a better term, more aware shippers, they'll put tracking units inside the loads. We've had situations where a load was stolen, and the tracking unit was activated. Because these tracking units are really nice, and they can tell you that, hey, there's light now in the back of this, this truck, the doors open, and the light sensor went off, and here's where it's located, and it actually alerts the authorities, and, you know, we can recover some of that freight. And when you think about it, these tracking devices, they're fairly cheap, you know, 36 bucks, 50 bucks, something like that, compared to a $200,000 load. Makes sense to me.

Blythe Brumleve: 56:48

Makes a ton of sense. And I'm curious as it, you know, we've been talking, you know, a little bit about technology already. I'm curious and maybe how some of these fraudsters are using technology, you mentioned AI and sort of voice cloning, you know, we've talked about email addresses. I've heard of, you know, load boards being a problem too. You know, I think they say the best freight never makes it to a load board. But sometimes, you know, you have to use a load board. So what are maybe some of the tech that the fraudsters are using that other, you know, the brokers and the carriers can be a little bit more cautious about or, or maybe do their their double checking the shippers as well.

Unknown: 57:26

Well, you mentioned load boards, right? So they screen, scrape all these load boards, and they say, okay, hey, I have these loads going. Some of the, some of the tech that I see, a lot happens, happening is where they send a link to somebody it looks like maybe a load board. Do you have this negative review? I mean, nobody ever wants to have a negative like, what somebody's saying something bad about us, right? So, but by instinct, what is it? And we click that link, and as soon as you click that link, you may not even know, but then now you're infected with malware, right? And we're fishing, and they're gathering your data, and the link comes in, and sometimes the link will take you to a web page that looks like the page that sent it to you. Enter in your enter in your password, right? And then you enter in your password, thinking that, okay, well, I gotta and now they have your password. They may have access all your other passwords. And you have, we have some opportunity for for disaster, right there. So as far as some of the malicious attack would be the links, you know, spoofing. That's an old school thing still works. There's telephony solutions. We have some telephony solutions in place that will capture a spoof number and block that out, right so, you know, there's apps you can get, and I could call you, and it would look like, you know, maybe it looks like shiv is calling you, but it's really me, and then I can get, and get some information that way. But with, with, with some different

Blythe Brumleve: 58:47

What was that phrase you used? It?

Unknown: 58:49

Telephony, telephony, telephony. It's, it's just a general term to deal with anything that deals with a telephone or anything like that.

Blythe Brumleve: 58:56

Oh, interesting. I never heard that word before. So you learn something, you learn something. You know, I'm learning a lot in this episode, Shiv, I'm wondering, you know going to you for a second, when, what take me inside, sort of that, I guess, the the action, like war room, whenever you know that fraud has happened, or you suspect that that fraud has happened? What are the steps being taken to, I guess, get the freight back, to get insurance, involved law enforcement. What does that process look like, without giving away too much to the criminals?

Unknown: 59:31

Every situation is so different. And right now, as soon as you ask me that I'm thinking of like three people that I can think of in my head in terms of, like, there was, you know, one where it was like a fraudulent CDL that was given, it wasn't even a CDL. So we're contacting anybody and everybody that we can obviously, cargo net we go to often, sometimes we do reach out to Scott Cornell. We've been in touch with, like, the California detectives. So there's many, many different parties. It's just dependent on the situation and what we know and who we're in touch with. So for example, what Mark was getting at, where the shipper, like, put in a little sensor, or a little thing in the in the trailer, in their shipment. And this was when, you know, we kind of had this clue that, oh, maybe the shipment is being stolen, because now the driver is Mia. And this one was actually a great one, because we were able to contact cargo net. But also the shipper contacted their their contacts as well, and they were able to cargo net was there, and apparently there were choppers there. And just all sorts of parties that busted this warehouse, so it's really dependent on the situation. And of course, we're going after insurance like we're contacting the carriers, insurance company, we're contacting carrier, and all of our contacts that we have, as well as the local police from where it was picked up. And unfortunately, in that sense, because the local police departments don't know too much about car theft. They're not very like they don't know how to handle it like this. Over the weekend, I was working with a detective in California who, you know himself, went inside this location, versus the police went there. They just scoped the scene outside and they left. They didn't actually do any any, you know, any digging, and they didn't try and ask anybody anything. So the problem becomes that as well. So we're really just contacting any and all parties as much as we can to try and figure out, find a lead. You know, check online, run these phone numbers online, check these names, CDL names, like it's, yeah, it's just a lot, but every case is very, very different and very interesting.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:01:42

It sounds like a full time job trying to do, like, how and I think that that, you know, as I'm saying, that it's almost like, Thank God you're, you know, a freight agency for your freight agents, that they don't have to, I don't say worry about this, because they they obviously have to worry about it. But when something happens, I'm assuming that they reach out to one of you two, and then that's when the investigation kind of starts. And it's more, it's a an extreme amount of value add to be able to have a resource like that, versus if you were just, you know, maybe like a smaller brokerage trying to figure this out on your own, trying to get all the technology and detectives involved. So it sounds like you know that with the freight agents, they're able to call y'all immediately and be able to get y'all on it.

Unknown: 1:02:30

Yeah, yeah. We actually just had one of our shippers who was telling us how much we've done for them, like no other broker does as much like, time and effort, and, you know, this is unfortunately, possibly a lost cause, we don't know yet, but we're still trying, like, we're still talking to the detective, we're still trying to get leads, we're still doing as much as we can, and it's been over, like, a month, and they're just like, you know, there's no other broker like that would have helped us as much as you guys are helping us. So that is definitely a good it's a good feeling to hear that, but it would be nice to have that win as well.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:03:04

Marcus, I saw you shaking your head there, as far as, like, you know, being that resource to your your agents out there, you know, what? What does, I guess? What does that sort of flow of action look like for the freight agents, are they? Do they suspect it? Is it? You know, maybe you guys have an internal team that's monitoring things, and they can kind of shine a light on it for them. I almost imagine, like the agent needs to keep, like, a freight fraud tab open. That's, you know, seven different tools monitoring every single load. Is, Am I over dramatizing this? If that's awkward.

Unknown: 1:03:39

Okay, so this is a shameless plug for spite, by the way. So one of the nice things that that SPI has, and what they do with their tech stack is they make it they make life incredibly easy with regards to fraud and risk mitigation for the agents. We've got some tools in our tech stack that, you know, an agent can simply put in an MC number, and it runs through almost instantaneously, runs through all of our our algorithm algorithms, runs through everything that we have, and come back and lets you know, hey, this carrier is good, or hey, this carrier is a carer that's posed some opportunities, and we're not going to be able to load them. So right up front, you know, we're helping them identify possible bad actors. So that's key, and that's helped us tremendously. Now, when you get a carrier on and you know, for whatever reason, there is a bad actor involved, and it's made it through the initial screening. You know, what SBI has set up is we have an internal notification system and an agent sends it since, basically an email into this system and says, Hey, I think I have a problem. And then from there, you know, shifts team, you know, they, they jump all over it. And, you know, she was going through it, she was being a little humble. They've got a lot of different things that they put together. And it's together. And it's, it's like, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's like clockwork. It just comes right through and and they, they hand, hold those agents through that process. Call the carrier, ask him this. Call this. We'll take care of this. We'll do that. We do we as an SBI, we do everything we possibly can to make it as easy as possible for the agent when it comes to a situation like that. Because, listen, you know, it may maybe that agent is is never encountered this type of a situation before, so we can bring the full expertise to bear for them.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:05:30

No that, that definitely makes a lot of sense, and it definitely a value add resource. Is that you take advantage of a team that is working on your side, and can can be the trusted advisor that you need. And, you know, those moments of panic, so I couldn't imagine, you know, what, what they would go through during that process. So it sounds like it's a little bit, you know, you have a good reaction plan in place when something happens. What about some of the, I guess, the preventative ways that you can, you know, try to prevent, you know, fraudsters or fraud carriers, and, you know, double brokering, anything like that. From my understanding, it comes down to, like, a certain checklist of your carrier selection. Can you maybe run through, like, what does, what does a good carrier look like in spi's eyes?

Unknown: 1:06:22

Shiv, you want to take that? Yeah. So for us, of course, similar to what Mark said, like we have a system in place, and there's a bunch of different points that that system pulls in terms of the carrier. Of course, we look at them in highway to make sure they're a pass, which, you know, basically, that's vetted through our process and everything such as that, but also to prevent this stuff, I think, to reiterate, like, when it comes to email addresses, making sure you're sending it to the verified email address, making sure you've spoken to the person you're not just and if they're calling from, you know, a load posting, hang up and call back the actual number. Make sure the person that's calling you, because people aren't checking the phone number like this happens to be, you know, similar to that email hacking. If they call you from a random number, but they have hacked the legitimate carriers email address. Now they're telling you, hey, I send it to the verified email address, but they're receiving it on the back end, but that phone number is a fraudulent phone number. So you have to do your due diligence in all those areas, which is emails, phone numbers, you know, obviously checking 411, for additional reports, and then it, for us, it have to be a passing highway if I've missed anything mark, sorry. Yeah. So a couple things I would say, as far as what, what classifies as a, as a, as a good carrier? I think that was the question. You know, I don't necessarily want to look at it and say, Hey, here's what's a good or bad carrier. I think I would just look at a carrier and say, here's a care where there's where there's less risk, right? So some of the things that that pop for us, for less risk, is we, you know, we look at how long have they had their authority? You know, have they had it one day versus six months? In some situations, we look at the insurance provider. There are some insurance providers out there where we would look at it and say, You know what? It's not necessarily an insurance provider that we would want to work with, right? Versus, you know, somebody else. Another thing that we would look at is, have there been specific changes on that carriers information? You know, that's another red flag, you know, without getting too far down a rabbit hole and, you know, giving up some of the secret sauce, there are ways that that carriers bad actors can can weasel in and and make themselves appear as as somebody that they're not. So there's some identifiers that we use in our tech stack that pops that right? You know, another thing that we're looking at is, hey, is this carrier actively tracking? Right? Do they have a tracking history? Because our technology, we link in with several different providers. You know, I keep saying that, you know, we link in with Highway, with carrier Sure, with trucker tools, with Project 44 with macro point, and it goes down the list, goes buyer B, and it goes all down this list. So we look at, are they tracking? Because then have they tracked regularly, right? You know, has this carry around a specific Lane before you know, if it's a carrier that that has only never ran in Florida and are only based in Florida, why are they looking for a load in Alaska? Right? Just, just something like that, that's, that's kind of odd. So, so there's different flags that pop up. So again, it's not necessarily a good or a bad carrier, it's just carriers where there's less risk.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:09:38

Yeah, because I was just seeing a report earlier today about you would think in sort of the economic conditions that that we find ourselves in, and rates are really low and freight is slow, the opportunities are few and far between for right now, but I just saw a report that even more carriers are continuously entering the market despite all of the downturn and that we've seen. And so I sort of feel bad for the folks that are coming onto the scene, and they're new and, you know, they're hungry and they want to get to work, but maybe there's a lot of these hoops that they have to jump through. I'm curious, because I would love to do this for, you know, carrier shippers and agents out there, what are, sort of, what are the ways that a new carrier can make themselves appear, or maybe not appear, but show that they're valid, show that they're real people, show that they're just, you know, good, honest, hard working folks. What? Maybe, what are some of those signs outside of being new that they can. Prove that they're, you know, a good, good company to hire.

Unknown: 1:10:40

Oh, sure, shave. You want me to start? Yeah, you can start. Okay, so, from my perspective, attend some of these conferences, like a broker carrier Summit, right? You attend that broker carrier Summit? I've met a plethora of carriers at that summit, you know, and if they're there, they're serious about their business. It's something to be said, okay, they're taking time off the road to be there. And, you know, you can build that rapport right away. I think that's, that's a big thing, too. Another thing that they can do is they can call you and, you know, they call like a corporate procurement office. I'm looking for freight. How do I get set up? Instead of just calling off of a post it load? I think that's one thing. You know. I've also seen it where they have a carrier who's within your network, and they have that carrier call you and vouch for them. I've had that just the other day. Hey, this guy just started. He's starting up his company. I'm very good friends with him, and, you know that type of rapport, and I've gotten on a conference call just just the other day with the with these two carriers, and just kind of talk through the process, right? But those are, those are big things that I see, they can get on podcast, right? Hey, Blythe, I'd really like to be on your show. I'm a new carrier. What do I do? That's a great way to do it. So I think that's key. It used to be in a day get a bunch of reviews, but you can have aI fake some of the reviews and things like that. But, you know, Chevrolet, you got anything that I missed? No, I think that's, that's pretty good. I mean, obviously there are certain brokers that have a specific, you know, they won't onboard a carrier unless they've been active for six months to a year for us at 60 days, which isn't bad at all. But I think yes, just like Mark said, if you start, especially if you start building that with one office as well within our agency, and you run some loads, and then you build that relationship, and that would happen like within freight freight brokerage, right? You can always try and reach out to other brokers within our brokerage and see you can move some other lanes. But if you build that relationship with, you know, one agency within a brokerage, like that's something to do that can help.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:12:47

So it sounds like I need to have my own, like, carrier vetting process for podcast guests. So that's maybe there's some kind of, like a highway or a carrier sure that can help me with that in the future to just the carriers are legit before they come on the show.

Unknown: 1:13:02

Another shameless plug for carriers here, or Cassandra's going to love me, right? So, so she's got a really nice platform for carriers, because it didn't exist before, where they can go in and they can type in a MC for a broker or for an agent, right? And see, so that's a good way for carriers not to get scammed, right? Because when you think about it, the these carriers are a lot of people are injured, but they're a true victim. Somebody stole their identity. Now they're held liable, and now what are they going to do? You know? So you got to look at it from that perspective as well, too. So it's not just a, yeah, it's not just a broker and a shipper situation. You have legitimate carriers who are victims, and a lot of these, a lot of these thefts, what happens is they these bad actors will steal load, and they'll take it from a shipper, and they'll rent time at a warehouse, and, you know, they're paying cash. They got the load here. It's coming in. They're changing the paperwork instead of TVs, it just says electronics, and then shipping out the other side to a legitimate carrier who just thinks and they are just picking up a loan from one warehouse one to another. Maybe they're paid, maybe they're not.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:14:12

Oh, that's so tragic. Because, I mean, I hate to say like, oh, a big company can kind of survive that. But you know a smaller company, 90% of you know all the trucks on the road, or seven carry, or seven trucks or less. And so one incident is probably bankruptcy for that carrier, for that company. And so that that's really tragic is carrier, sure the only company that helps? You know carriers deal with potential broker fraud.

Unknown: 1:14:39

Well, there's some other companies I know that are building tools for it, I think highways in the process of building something for that, and that piece as well. I don't know if it's actually released yet, but you know, when I go to the some of these events and stuff, and I know Cassandra, I mean, her platform does, does a pretty good job vetting that out.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:14:59

Now, shifting gears a little bit because we have seen, you know, well, actually, I kind of want to stay with that for a minute, because there has been somewhat of a increase in fraud focused conferences within our industry. I'm curious as to, you know, what happens maybe at some of these fraud conferences, you know, is what kind of topics are being discussed there that you're taking back to the office. Chevelle, I'll go to you for this one, that you're going to these conferences and, you know, learning things there, what kind of topics are being discussed there that you kind of take back to your learnings?

Unknown: 1:15:34

I think there's a lot, I mean, for us. Especially a lot of it that we come back with are either contacts. So that's the kind of way that we got in touch with like the detective and things like that, or even websites where you can use, you know, these, these tools to either search phone numbers or, you know, fraudulent emails, things like that. I know we come back with a lot of email, I'm sorry, those kind of like techno technology resources as well as, I would say, connections, when it comes to like in the industry, somebody who can help us out when these thefts occur, that's a huge thing. But the topics, I would say, it's a lot of that, as well as insurance and what insurance providers are good and what to look for in cares, you know, insurance certificates, or when vetting these carriers, what's what to also look for? There's so much, because these conferences are, you know, a couple of days long, and there's so many different kinds of sessions, like even insurance policies, like I said, when it comes to what is going to be covered, what kind of exclusions exist, what to kind of watch out for what carrier should watch out for as well. There's a lot I'm just trying to drawing a blink, but we come back with so much and so many stories too, right? We're just kind of like, okay, well, how did you guys combat that? Or how did you guys recover that cargo? And that gives us ideas on other things to do in the next time, or even recovering load, like it's not just fraud, but even recovering loads, and kind of knowing what we have the right to do as a freight broker and how we can go about talking to the police or talking to, you know, insurance companies or tote facilities when things like this occur. So there's just a huge, huge array of things, I think, that are discussed at these conferences.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:17:20

Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, you would just think that there would be, you know, oh, just get a few tools, and you should be fine. But you're involving detectives. You're involving tow truck companies detect. I just, I'm, my mind is a little blown that like detectives are going to, you know, these freight conferences as well, and being a resource to folks like yourself. So I think that's incredibly impressive, and just proves that just this industry is just the more layers you peel back. There's so many more that you can dive into. And I would imagine for a lot of shippers, it can be just daunting to even try to think about, you know, some of these solutions that you would have to deploy, which is probably why that they, you know, offload that to someone else. So I'm curious for maybe some some shippers that are are wondering how they can approach this topic better. What signs should they look for in a brokerage partner and an agent partner that they should look for to formulate that that relationship with them. Well, I

Unknown: 1:18:22

think the first thing a shipper should look for in a situation like that is, is that broker agent, or are they acting as a supply chain consultant? For me, right? Be having the opportunity of working on a shipper side as well. You know, I would always value those, those relationships from carriers or brokers who would bring me information. Here's what's happening in the market, here's what's going on. And some of my better relationships I had were times where somebody would say, Hey, listen, I just want to make sure you're aware of this right now, obviously they may be trying to do a soft sell or something, maybe, but you know what? It really helped me out in those regards. So I think in today's world with what's going on, if you're a shipper out there and you're shipping partners, your three PLS, your carrier, even your asset based carriers, if they're not coming to you and telling you, here's what's going on, x, y and z, then, then, why? Right? They should be saying, what questions should I be asking that I'm not you know, what conferences should I be going to that I may not be aware of, because in the end, if you're looking, if you as a shipper, you're looking at a freight brokerage or an asset based carrier is just somebody who's going to pick up my product from A to A to B at the lowest possible cost. Well, you're kind of setting yourself up for an opportunity in future really, right? You want somebody who's going to come in and be a supply chain consultant for you, not just a freight brokerage. That's that's not going to work for anybody. So that's what I would be looking for.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:20:01

And I would love to flip the script a little bit. Maybe there's a freight agent out there who is thinking about making a switch, hopefully to SPI. What should what should they be building, I guess maybe in their resume or their own sort of skill set, to be able to either join SPI and have these resources available to them, or maybe kind of sell themselves a little bit better, or get a little bit more knowledgeable on freight fraud as a whole, so that they can sell themselves better and make those relationships like with SPI a reality for them in the future.

Unknown: 1:20:36

Sure. So you talk. About a value proposition. Here's what I would say. If there's an individual out there who's a broker right now in a brokerage, or somebody who's an agent, who's not with SPI let's just stay with a broker, because I think that was the context of your question. If you're a broker at a freight brokerage, what you should be looking for is, how do you get more knowledge? What conferences Can you attend? And not everybody can attend those conferences, right? So, but you know what? There? There are so many different sources of information out there, in the on the internet, you know there, there's freight waves, there's freight caviar, there's podcasts like yours. There's podcasts out there that they can just sign on and join and learn, and then they should take that information and go to kind of what I just said before, and then bring that to their shippers. Right? What sets them apart from the other broker that's calling? Because in today's environment, those shippers are getting 200 300 calls a day, right? So instead of calling somebody saying, Hey, do you got any freight today? Or, Hi, my name is Mark, you know, could I send you a quote? You know? What would you come at a different perspective? Listen, I'm going to what's your email address, or I've got your email address for my a marketing tool, and I'm just going to send you this information. Maybe I'm not even going to ask for the freight. And you kind of build it up that way. So once you build your business and you got a deeper understanding with your customer, then you can take that customer and bring them to a company like SBI, right? And then you you open yourself up to everything that we offer, which I think is tremendous.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:22:08

It definitely sounds, it sounds like an incredible lifeline for for folks out there that you don't have to go it alone. You don't have to, you know, take on all this monetary risk and credit risk and all of these different factors that could, you know, one bad decision could put you out of business. It's definitely, I tell myself all the time, like, if it was, you know, 20 years ago, I would be a freight agent for SPI I don't think I'm built for it anymore. I don't have, you know, that the patience for the broker life or for the agent life, but it really is one of the most, I think, enviable positions in all of logistics, where you have, you know, the security of a big company, of working for a big company, but then you also have, you know, that little bit of an entrepreneurial side of the coin, where you can really, you know, build your own brand, Build your own business and merge those two worlds together. I would love, you know, a couple final notes here, maybe final pieces of advice. Shiva, I'll start with you. How do you prevent it? How do you rectify it when, relative to freight fraud, and any advice for maybe some freight agents out there, who are, you know, kind of swimming upstream right now.

Unknown: 1:23:20

I mean, I think what Mark said was really good, as well as basically notifying their shippers of all these risks and what's happening in the industry. One thing I did want to point out that recently happened that somebody was telling me is shippers not just checking, like, okay. Like, you know, ABC carriers supposed to come and then they look at and they're like, Okay, this is ABC carrier, but really checking their trucks as well, because there's trucks with just like, little cardboards on them that just, you know, has the name of the company right now, and they're really not looking at all. And I think that was one huge thing that I recently found out about. And, you know, I think that's a huge thing for shippers, but also freight agents to notify their shippers of these risks, and also them learning of all the risks that's happening. I think one of the biggest things is really being open to all the technology that is coming and because everything's changing. So like you said, 10 years ago, it was so easy to vet carriers and onboard carriers, but now a lot of the time, I find that they're not okay with this change, but we have to really be open to this change, because we have to change, just like the industry is changing and we have to start doing extra vetting. I think that's a huge thing is, you know, not staying back and saying, oh, but we're gonna have to do this, like 10 months ago, but now, unfortunately, we do, because we have to change with the time. So I think having that mindset would be really, really helpful for agents to prevent and as well as, you know, shippers and brokers,

Blythe Brumleve: 1:24:48

yeah, great insight that that's a great takeaway, because it's either adapt or survive. And I know a lot of carriers hate looking at the technology, and, you know, there's some gripes about it, but if it's going to keep you in business, you got to evolve

Unknown: 1:25:02

Exactly, exactly. What about Mark?

Blythe Brumleve: 1:25:05

What about for you? Any, any last minute advice for for freight agents out there, maybe curious about working with SBI?

Unknown: 1:25:10

Well, sure, if they're curious about SPI you can always reach out to us as a company. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, always willing to help anybody out, even if it's not related to being an agent for SBI, I have individuals who will call me who who don't work with us. They don't haul a load for us. They saw my name somewhere. And I'll reach out, and I'll do everything I can to help them, as far as last words or anything like that, I would just say over communicate, truly, if you're a shipper. Over communicate. This is what I'm shipping. This is what it is. And then also ask those questions from your broker, who's supposed to pick up my load? What's the name? What's the driver's name? Let's get some tracking on it, because, you know, life put it to you like this. Let's, let's say you put 200 because that's about the price of a load. Now, you put $200,000 in your purse, right? And you post that on that and you got a truck driver is going to pick up your purse. Do you trust that truck driver to take your person at $200,000 from your house in Florida to California?

Blythe Brumleve: 1:26:09

I'm working with SPI I do well, you want to make

Unknown: 1:26:12

sure you know who that individual is, right? And in today's world, you got a lot of different avenues to do that.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:26:18

So, no, that's great perspective. And just, it's such a it's bringing it back. I guess the earlier comment about, you know, carrier 411, is just no longer enough. You have to do several things, both tech wise and just feeling people out wise and position yourself, you know, be a sponge, learn as much as you can about these different tools and processes, go to conferences, meet people, because this is still at the end of the day, it's a relationship driven industry, and those relationships can get you far. As you two are very evident of that. And so thank you both for coming on the show and sharing this insight and perspective. I could talk about these different like cargo crime stories at ad nauseum, and I watch all of it. I don't know if y'all watch all the shows, but I watch all of the, you know, border crime and how to catch a smuggler, and you know, all of these different, you know, carrier focus shows, or crime focus shows that involves at the border or just trying to get goods in and out of the United States. So I don't know. Do y'all watch any of those shows by any chance? Yeah, definitely. I'm over here like guessing the type of drug that's in the truck, or you know that this one is smuggling this kind of stuff over here in statues. And I love it. And they, you know, they have a lot of tech involved in that as well. So this was a fun and interesting conversation. Obviously, it's a sad reality of, you know, the sort of the nature of what we're all discussing and trying to deal with, but it's good to know that there are resources out there. And I'm sure you know, all of the agents within SPI are super happy that they have, you know, folks that got their back, and you know they're able to lean on y'all during tough times. So thank you again for coming on the show. I'll be sure to link to both of your linkedins in the show notes, and, of course, link back to SPI for folks who want to reach out and hear more. But thank you guys again.

Unknown: 1:28:17

Thanks Blythe. Welcome into another

Blythe Brumleve: 1:28:20

episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I'm your host, Blythe Milligan, 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.

Unknown: 1:28:42

We're here. We met it. Thank you. Thank you so much. Really happy to be here, absolutely now,

Blythe Brumleve: 1:28:46

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?

Unknown: 1:28:52

Yeah, I am on the sales team. I think my title is sales. I don't know if we have other titles, but sales, enterprise, 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 carers connect via seamless single sign on experience. That's the formal I think what we actually do is we help carriers onboard to brokerages via a single sign on experience, kind of like when you press sign into Google to get YouTube TV. We want to help carriers get to a brokerage experiences like that, and at the same time, eliminate fraud. If you're to dive in, I'm ready to go deep. 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, prospective gain, right? What can I get from this? And in freight, it's the actual freight. Let me steal this anhyzer Bush 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 cut, or stealing the load and getting 100,000 a million dollars worth of freight there. So your prospective gain, you have anonymity. 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 some of 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 big anonymity aspect to it. And the third would be positive regain anonymity. Urgency in freight, every single broker is doing 100 things at once for all of their customers, and the name of the game is speed. So is this valuable? You don't know me, so there's low risk. And with urgency comes error. Human error is having too fast. So fraud became rampant. How he came in to solve the problem.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:31:09

Now, from what I understand, you guys connect into the VIN number. Or is that how it works?

Unknown: 1:31:15

Yeah, bunch of different ways. So the first is, who is this person? Are they the right 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 Mcdot to say, Do you have the authority? Do you have the insurance necessary to haul my freight, that

Blythe Brumleve: 1:31:33

kind of onboard them? So you're on boarding a carrier. It's even

Unknown: 1:31:36

just looking up like before you onboard, is this the right person? And then then you have the VIN level data, which we get from multiple avenues. But in the COI, the insurance cert itself will list the VINs. What we do, that's proprietary, is connected to the cares. ELD, so if you have 10 trucks and you're on sim Sarah or motive, or what have you, ELD, we connect to their 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 any insurance policy? Why are you claiming 10, but you're lying, or vice versa. Why are you claiming 10? Would have 80.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:32:11

What's going on here? 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, you that this person might not. They might Exactly.

Unknown: 1:32:39

Oh, you got it, yeah. It's a trigger warning for for anyone to know. And that specific thing is what we call 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 nature a carrier, which is what you're supposed to do. Like you wouldn't book 12 loads the nature carrier yourself, but 12 different brokers have now booked with 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 there's short hauls. You can do more than one load a day, but if it's more than x percent or X number of miles. If it's within this same scheduled pickup delivery date, you're gonna get an alert. He's overworked his

Blythe Brumleve: 1:33:24

assets. What's the craziest type of fraud you've seen so far

Unknown: 1:33:28

in terms of, like, manipulative activity, or, like stolen freight, or like, how it slipped through

Blythe Brumleve: 1:33:33

manipulative and the craziest, like, load that was stolen? Yeah, I tried

Unknown: 1:33:37

to be stolen. I'm not going to 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. So those are always the hot ticket fraud events. You should always be on red alert. The higher the value, the more red alert you should be on, from that perspective. And 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 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 L and seven, I lowercase? 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 a source of truth for so long, but now you think you're talking the right person, but their FMCSA data was just hacked, and it's the fraudster who's impersonating the good guy. The good guy screwed. The broker working with the good guy screwed. There's a mess. And how does

Blythe Brumleve: 1:34:59

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: 1:35:07

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 is trying to log in and change a couple things? Okay, okay, they're requesting a new code to change their 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. Spelled 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: 1:36:01

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, you know, 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: 1:36:32

Yeah, there's a lot of avenues you can go down here, but I'm gonna take a step up and talk about the life cycle, 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 veticare, you talk to them. They email you, they call you. Vice versa. So we have an email plug in and a phone plug in email, plug in lives on your Gmail, on your outlook, on your front app to give you a quick indicator, red light, yellow light, green light, just a good guy or 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 our phones, Red Alert. This is not who you think it is. This is a front of 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 your 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

Blythe Brumleve: 1:38:12

even fail. I didn't think about it from 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.

Unknown: 1:38:24

Used to be that easy, right? It used to be that easy 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 take your license out and scan it and scan the barcode, then you put your face up and you do the all the fun stuff. 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: 1:38:53

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?

Unknown: 1:39:02

Our 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. You bring value in the values 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's doing when you press send into Google. You don't know what Wi Fi is doing when you like to log into Wi Fi, you don't have to know. You trust it. 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: 1:39:50

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 come around,

Unknown: 1:39:57

it's a boomerang, yeah, you may tell me no, six months ago, and then the inbox is open, respond, and they'll come back.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:40:04

What 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: 1:40:14

I read cargo net stuff, because programs 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. Funding exponentially every year.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:40:38

And is that because of technology or just because maybe some regulations that we lack in the United States? Yeah.

Unknown: 1:40:44

I mean maybe both, yes, yes. I think it all boils back to what we said first, prospective gain, anonymity, urgency. It's a hotbed for for stolen items. Like, why would prospective gain? You're not going to 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: 1:41:14

What? Yeah, I had no idea was that easy to get an MC. Had to get a CDL or and then MC,

Unknown: 1:41:20

the very entry is very low, which

Blythe Brumleve: 1:41:22

is incredible. Maybe a good thing, yeah,

Unknown: 1:41:25

right, anything and everything. But yeah,

Blythe Brumleve: 1:41:27

any good customer stories that you can share with us, or you can leave the customer name out, or case, yeah.

Unknown: 1:41:32

I mean, we have public customer testimonies. If you go to highway.com hit the articles or Partners tab, whatever it is, and 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 straight stories. All of a sudden, we're on the spot. I know, mode just announced. Ch Robinson did a big announcement. Feniche did one. Taylor logistics has done one, but they're on the website.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:42:00

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

Unknown: 1:42:12

as well. Yeah, integrations are necessary, because you can have a wonderful product and that does everything for you. If it's not integrated, then you still have the human error aspect. 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. What does this sort of the onboarding process look like for a carrier, for like a broker, signing up today? Oh, maybe both. Yeah. So carriers, single sign on. You press into the 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. 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 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 carrier onboarding, and then as a new customer comes. The highway. Depends on what TMS are on and on how long it's gonna 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. 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, McLeod, Mercury gate, those types that may take 3060, days to get integrated because it's a carrier process, but yeah,

Blythe Brumleve: 1:43:55

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?

Unknown: 1:44:07

Yeah, so let's put a couple different hats on. You're a broker on the floor, you're a carrier rep, or you're creator of the grave. Highway is absolutely one of those screens, because part of highway is sourcing capacity. How do I find carriers to 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, twosies that have 100,000 in cargo coverage insurance. Create my filter. Here's every carrier who runs that lane. Do 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 don't 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, but he's failing your rules, you're going to bubble it up to your compliance team to say, hey, they're failing, but it's only for this which is not fraud related, maybe it's performance related or safety scores. But can we use this carrier? Then the compliance guy is going to dig in and say, Well, normally we wouldn't, but their EOD 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 there's different hats and how often they're going to use it. I wouldn't say every person at 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 phony rated through TMS. They're just going to log into TMS to see it right there. You can go both ways.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:45:36

But so what happens if you. Discover a problem after you've already booked the carrier.

Unknown: 1:45:40

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 through TMS systems. It's an API integration. It monitors carriers every five minutes, three, five or seven minutes, feeling 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 web hook integration, which web hook is, push and pull, and it's immediate. As soon as something happens, it's immediate, the responses in your TMS, right there. Now to your point you already booked the load, maybe the carriers on the load, actively Red Alert, like everyone all eyes on your calling the carrier, what's going on. You're tracking the ELD. Where's your truck right now? There's not much.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:46:25

I just put it two and two together. You kept saying, like, Red Alert, green alert, Highway. The highway lights. Took me a minute.

Unknown: 1:46:32

I'm right there, but it took me about a year. So you're like, a year and 20 minutes faster than this.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:46:40

Now you came from freight waves, yeah. And what was it? What was the reason? What, what did, maybe is the biggest difference between freight waves and then making the transition over to Highway, yeah?

Unknown: 1:46:51

So I was at Freightways 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 buy our solution and enforce that company wide. That's the biggest difference, I would say, between, like a freight waves, sonar product versus highway, SAS solution versus data provider.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:47:33

Yeah, it's all intelligence. Yeah, it's one of those where highway, from my understanding, is one of those that you it sounds like it's become very pivotal to a broker's day or carriers day,

Unknown: 1:47:45

for sure. It's definitely it's touched frequently, for sure.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:47:49

So what? What's next for highway? What do you guys got, you know, cooking?

Unknown: 1:47:54

Yeah, there's, 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. 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 that's free for carriers to vet brokers. Are you talking the right person, or is this someone impersonating the broker? What's their days depending 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 that. Make sure I'm 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: 1:48:36

That's super interesting, because then you're putting the power back in the carriers.

Unknown: 1:48:40

Carries 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, like you're already here while we charge you for doing something you're already doing. Just give them some more benefit.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:48:52

That's awesome. All right. Well, read, anything else that you feel is important to mention that we haven't already talked about, we have to,

Unknown: 1:48:58

like, we have, 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 us a lot of ways. Go to our website, highway.com, and you get a demo from there, there's a lot of information, but

Blythe Brumleve: 1:49:12

yeah, yeah, better safe than sorry. Sign up for highway,

Unknown: 1:49:15

yeah. Thank you. Thank you much. Yeah. Really appreciate it.

Blythe Brumleve: 1:49:19

Welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast where the thinkers in freight, I am your host, Blythe Milligan, and we are proudly sponsored by SPI logistics. And we've got one more our last interview at manifest, a future of supply chain and logistics, at least the last live one. And we've got a repeat company, not repeat, yes, but a repeat company coming back on the show. We got Jonathan Ryan overhauls, Chief Product Technology Officer, to talk about the state of cargo crime for 2025 along with a new, I guess, our product that you guys are launching, here are you. Is the press release dropped today. I don't believe it dropped today. I think it dropped it a little while ago. But, yeah, gonna talk more about it. Gotcha. And that is your new fraud watch AI solution, the 55 million in funding that they announced previously, as well as broader trends happening in supply chain risk management and cargo rift risk Theft Prevention space. So that was a mouthful for myself, so I'm going to let the expert take over from here and Jonathan, give us a give us a preview. Give us an overview of how you got into logistics. How you got into, you know, working for overhaul, all that good stuff. Yep. So you know, unfortunately, I don't have a 20 year story to tell you about how I got into supply chain logistics, but I completed a computer science degree in Ireland. I'm from Ireland, and work. In finance for a year in Ireland, really wanted to go to the US and explore more on the technology side and get into something there. And I kind of expected, after a year in the US, I'd return to Ireland and have to find a new company, but come back with some experience, but I found overhaul. And, you know, I started working in the product and kind of tech support space eight years ago, almost nine years ago now. And you know, one of the lucky things about that, I guess, is it meant wearing a lot of hats. And as we kind of pivoted into the SaaS solution that we have today, I moved more into the product space, engineering space. And over the years, then, as we found that product market fit, moved into engineering management, VP of engineering. And then year and a half ago, we consolidated the product and engineering orgs into technology, and then I moved into the cpto role. And so with your your role, with overhaul, what does sort of a day to day look like for you? There is no one single day for sure. But, you know, we have a we have a global team, engineers and product managers. So a lot of what I try to do is just make sure that everybody's on the same page around what we want to achieve, what are some of the challenges we're facing. You know, what I really like to try and incorporate into all of our technology teams is good industry understanding. I think it's really important that whether you're an engineer or a product manager, you understand the space and you know why you're solving the problem. And so it's a lot of that coordination, and then also just, you know, working with our sales marketing that go to market strategy, things like that, and are really just, you know, pretty broad still, I think we're coming out of that startup phase, and we've been out for a while, but as someone who joined the company fairly early, you know, you still kind of wear quite a few hats and try to Solve, tackle quite a few problems. So from a high level, what does sort of risk and prod fraud prevention look like in the modern day? 2025 logistics company? Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, that's the that's the first question everybody asks is, what does risk mean to you? And so, you know, our software is risk management solution across a variety of different risks. So the risk might be on time performance eta is, and the risk that that means to your customers not arriving on time, and how it can affect your relationship. But more traditionally, what we focus on is security and risk. And so what that means is the actual integrity of the goods and the load, and also the safety of the driver as part of that as well. And so what will what we set out to achieve is, you know, first and foremost, be preventative. You don't want to stolen goods. You don't want pilferages That you're having to respond to. So we try to, through incorporation of our technology technology, improve our customer supply chains by bringing in best in class processes, procedures, trying not to overwhelm, you know, I think it's important that you're able to keep very close to the procedures and processes they follow today, but incorporate technology in the right places so that you can get that data back and help continually monitor and improve their network. You just mentioned, you know, sort of the, I guess, the safety of the driver, which is, I think I haven't really heard any other sort of risk prevention, fraud prevention company talk about, can you expand on that a little more? Yeah. I mean, you know, in the early days, before we kind of pivoted into the SaaS solution, that was something that we were very focused on, was, how can we help the drivers, carriers, you know, find these higher value shipments and loads and somebody who's been performing, you know, at a very high level for years, but maybe struggling to get into that continual, reoccurring operations. And so as part of that driver focus, you know, we wanted to ensure that there was safety from their perspective as well, particularly when you're operating globally in some of these more dynamic environments where there can be, you know, concerns around that. I think that's as important as ensuring the cargo. You know, when I had a previous guest from from overhaul on the show, we were talking before we recorded that, they had mentioned all of the, I guess, the differences between countries of Brazil versus Mexico versus the United States, of how they try to have, you know, try to implement fraud prevention, risk management, things like that. I'm curious how that's evolved, what is sort of, I guess, a high level process look like, because you mentioned that some of those things that are happening in other countries are now coming to the United States, yeah. And so maybe to even take a step back a little bit and speak to what overhaul does. So we are a software company, and we look at integrating all of the various data that already exists out there. And so we're not hardware. We don't build devices, but we do integrate with them, and we are device and IoT agnostic. And so what that allows us to do via maybe TMS, ERP, WMS, OMS integrations, is create that customer shipment and then via our telematics ELD, IoT integrations populate that shipment with with those data sources and those pings that that allow us to track a shipment. And so what that does from the security perspective then, and maybe getting into you know, what we see across different regions that provides a higher level of A. Visibility and higher frequency and a higher resolution network. And so when it comes to cargo theft, you know, what we've typically seen in areas like our regions like Mexico, Brazil, is a lot more risk to the driver in those areas. And it can be, you know, I'm not sure what the right word to put on it is, but you know, an environment where the driver is definitely, you know, a little more aware of the issues they might might encounter while on the road. But what we've seen over the last, you know, couple of years, is a lot of those methods that were happening overseas, outside of the US, actually come into the US now, and we've seen things such as the Romanian role. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's honestly like something straight out of Fast and Furious. You know, where the load is moving down the road at high speeds, and they're actually pilfering it and unloading the cargo while in motion, and taking things out of the back of the trailer. So that's just an example of some of the methods that we've seen that have started to become more frequent in the US, where we had typically seen them overseas. Wow, that is absolutely insane. There was another thing, and I don't know if this is happening yet in the United States, but there was another thing that he had mentioned that for in Brazil, they almost try to recruit high schoolers to, you know, just get into with the cartels and the local gangs within Brazil, and then they recruit them to start working at different logistics companies. And so then they have an in once that person graduates high school or graduates their schooling, and then goes and works for these logistics companies. Yeah, absolutely. You know, that's not something that we've encountered too much of in the US. But you know what ties in similar, very closely to that, is that you know people on the inside and you know carrier companies that are set up and trying to look as reputable as can be. But part of what our fraud watch solution does is it incorporates, first of all, you know, a very rich historical data set that we have from an intelligence perspective, but then also integrating with third party data source, sources such as the FMCSA data, along with a variety of other sources. And so what that helps us identify are those illegitimate carriers, or carriers that are trying to appear as if, as if they're legitimate, and they've been working in the industry for a while. And so that's where our fraud watch. When a carrier is entered into the system as part of the process, is able to flag that, hey, this after passing through our rules engine, this doesn't meet the criteria that we would expect, and you might want to, you know, reconsider shipping that load with this carrier. That's super interesting. And so it's almost like an alert system prior to maybe it becoming a problem. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And maybe just to even speak a little more to fraud watch in that context. So a big problem that a lot of our customers had, and that a lot of people still have in the industry, is double brokering and shipment being created, maybe via their TMS platform, and, you know, a certain carrier being assigned, but then who actually shows up on the day to pick up that load? And that's where we have software that's available at the dock that allows them to capture the carrier who's showing up at that time, and then we assess it against who was the originally booked carrier through the TMS, and then compare if that's double brokered. And then at that same time, run that through our fraud watch system to be able to understand, you know, is, has it been operating for more than six months? Is there more than one driver there? Do they have more than one tractor or trailer register? There's a lot of these different nuances, you know, that we've understood through our history, but also through our intelligence teams that work at overhaul to really kind of define and make that fraud watch product very, you know, useful and impactful for our customers. And so when, when somebody is using fraud watch, is it almost like they're they have a screen open on, you know, say, like a traditional, like, broker's office or something. They have four screens, and they're booking lows, they're calling, they're sourcing, carriers are doing all of that stuff. Do they have fraud watch as, like, one on something, one of their screens as they're looking at on a day to day basis? So there's, actually, there's a few different ways that they can use fraud watch. And so first and foremost fraud watch is, you know, preventative, and we try not, as I said before, to disrupt their flow of how they do things. So for example, if if they want to create shipments in a TMS, then at that time, via an API, we will assess the carrier that they've assigned so that can be completely hands off, just through their TMS system. And then we can send that as a notification or an alert to whoever at the at the customer wants to be notified of that, to say that, hey, you've potentially put a risky carrier on on this load. So that's kind of hands off approach. Then we have software that can, you know, be loaded onto a tablet, a mobile application. And we're also looking at app list, because who doesn't have app fatigue at this point? And that's where it can be a little more hands on, where you're capturing at that. Point of departure, who the carrier is, and so that's that's alerting that to you. But then, as you mentioned, there is also a web app that has the carrier dashboard where you can enter carriers in, and you know, maybe it's not that one time check out, where you're assessing that particular carrier, but you're uploading multiple carriers, and you're getting that bulk check and just assessing your network for any of the latest risks. So exception management, maybe, yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and one thing is that, you know, people will will talk about AI every other second word here is probably going to be AI, but you know, you're only as good as the data that you have and the intelligence that you have, and that's where on the overhaul side, something that is very unique to us is 16 years worth of intelligence data from an intelligence team who has worked in this space. You know, we have some formal law enforcement with over 80 years between them who are working in tandem with so you actually have officers too that are working for overhaul, yep. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, we really aim to combine machine learning AI data, but with subject matter experts as well, you know, to validate, to review, of course, not every shipment that ever travels is captured in overhaul. So we do have other integrations, and we do have team members that are focused on understanding Well, what are the latest trends? What do we need to be able to respond to? I can actually give you another example of something that we're seeing and how I would love to see it here. So that was gonna be my next question. Is here some of those latest trends, commodities that are targeted maybe sticks. So there's been a 50% increase from 2023 to 2024 in cargo theft, and 30% of that has been around electronics. So electronics is heavily, heavily targeted. 50% of that has been pilferage, and I think 25% has been full truckload. So you know, we're seeing a big uptick in cargo theft. But you know, to speak the overhaul, one thing we do also see is that for the goods that are targeted frequently, or are maybe more high value. One out of every 2000 loads that aren't monitored by overhaul, we'll see a theft event, you know, maybe a tempted pilferage, a pilferage things like that. Does that mean, you know, somebody's trying to stay like the Romanian road that what you were talking Yeah, they're just trying to take, you know, a couple of couple of boxes off the back, maybe some TV screens, consoles, things like that. You know, just trying to use the moment get away with with what they can. And so that's one in 2000 that we see targeted that aren't monitored by overhaul. But then when you are monitored by overhaul, it's one in 35,000 so our preventative measures is what we really focus on as to Don't get yourself into that situation where you're susceptible to cargo theft, or you're driving on a lane or in a region, or using a carrier who is going to, you know, potentially put that load at risk. And so that's, you know, super interesting stat, I think, from our side, is that we are, you know, continuously beating that industry trend for those who target high value goods. But sorry, I forgot. I was going to get back to the the example. And so one thing that we're seeing is speaking to the sophistication of Cairo criminals today, is that they will take the bol at a at an origin facility and then get in transit, and they'll actually have printers in the cab with them to Doctor the bol and then show up at the delivery location, give the you know, receiver the updated BOL, and then leave with you know, the rest of of the goods. And so that's where that double brokering and preventative step is so important, and that's the kind of issue that fraud watch is tackling. And honestly, that's been that's been growing rapidly. Wow. What are some other, maybe trends that are evolving? Because I have heard, I think it was around 2020, or maybe 2021, that it wasn't necessarily electronics that were being targeted. It was more like perishables. So energy drinks, where, I think we're a big one, pistachios were also a big one. Are there any other like commodities? Maybe, because for a lot of, I think, for the audience, for a lot of those examples, there's no tracking those products, because once they're eaten or used that you can't find, you know, a VIN number or UPC number on the back of that, versus, like, an electronic device. So I'm curious if you know any of those other sort of commodity trends you're seeing in your data. Yeah, I think, you know, one of the recent stories that came up was maybe you saw it around the eggs. Eggs being stolen. No, and so, you know, that kind of speaks an X Wing stolen. Sorry, eggs. I knew the Irish accident get me in trouble here, yeah, and so and so we saw recently, and I think, you know, it hit pretty much mainstream news as well around eggs being stolen. And that, you know, speaks to how agile a lot of these cargo criminals are, because it's not necessarily about the value of the goods, it's also about demand. And so, you know, eggs is something that's been very topical over this last while. And so they know. And a lot of these carrot criminals are also wholesalers, the good one, the good ones. And so to them, it's about margin and how quickly you can shift that. And so sometimes, when you see something like demand for eggs, and you know that there's market there for it, that's actually, you know, there's can be more incentive than going and taking TVs, because they know that they can just move that so quickly. And it's once it's gone, it's gone. Yeah, there's no traceability to it. What other trends, I guess, are you seeing for maybe, you know, 2025, and beyond, you know, I really just do think that it's the continued sophistication of of how these category criminals are operating. I think that example that I gave of the updated bol shows that they're much more familiar with what's happening in terms of how people are monitoring goods and how they're responding to it. And so that's, you know, a constant evolution on our side is, how can we stay ahead of that? You know, we can bring out the latest technology and then we might see them respond. And so we got to keep being ahead of it, and from my perspective, overhaul, being device agnostic, and being able to leverage the variety of different IoT sources across many of the manufacturers, gives us that advantage, because we're not tied into a specific type of device. We've introduced new things this year, such as the Bluetooth seal, where it's a seal that's on the back of the trailer, and when it's cut, it communicates with the device that's inside to let them understand that. You know, this has now been targeted, and it's a definite this, this door has been opened. So you know, our flexibility there from a data point of view. Then there's door switches that can be installed for when the door opens, and a lot of different solutions and configurations like that and and it's that configurability that I think resonates most with our customers, is that we're able to respond, you know, and be very agile to these challenges that occur as criminals get more sophisticated. Is there a, I guess, a recommended tech stack for somebody to avoid fraud in particular, like you mentioned, the Bluetooth device, maybe the door sensors. What would if you were starting a trucking company and you were worried about your freight, how would you secure it? It's great question. And you know, it honestly comes down to to the use case. You know, are you multimodal? Are you using rail? Are you shipping over overseas or air vessel, because there's a lot of different intelligence that we can pull into those container tracking or master airway build tracking to understand if the route is changing dynamically and make sure, because that's one of the most important things is how accurate is the data from A to B, and are you able to define the lanes and the risks that might be occurring there. But, you know, maybe just to try and answer your question, I do think incorporating a Bluetooth seal or a door switch, depending on you know, how you're going to be shipping, those are the solutions today that I think are the most effective to combating it, and, yeah, having multiple integrations and data sources. So for example, what we'll always strive for as a device an IoT agnostic company is, can we integrate the ELD or the telematics that are going to be on the tractor trailer? Can we combine that with an IoT source? So for example, if a trailer got separated, or if cargo got separated, you're understanding that separation, because we have multiple data points in real time on that shipment. So yes, there are configurations that I think are the, you know, best in class with, with seal and door switches. But then I also think just continuing to push and incorporating more of what's already out there into overhaul, and then we can detect any separations or anomalies that occur outside of just sort of, you know, the, I guess, the IoT devices, or, you know, the fraud watch. Is there any like, sort of just base level things that companies can do to try to avoid their risk profile? Yeah, I think the, you know, going to the preventative measure, and that's where we've really been focusing more of our attention on the last couple of years, because I think we've done a fantastic job for the in transit, A to B, once it's left, got extensive Law Enforcement Network to back us up there, but it's really about being more preventative. So you know, working with us to look at your carrier network, look at the lanes and regions, seeing what's the theft profile for those for those lanes, are you an electronics customer who's operating on a lane or region that has seen a growth in electronics theft. So that's the base level thing. Is just getting ahead of it, and what we've termed shifting left, back into, you know, the network, the lanes, the regions, and just as you're setting up for maybe, you know, q3 q4 launches of new products or things that you know will be targeted. It's just doing that work ahead of time to ensure you know you're as safe, secure as you can be. But you know, nothing is perfect. There's always ways that can happen so but, but I do feel the preventative measures are what's what's really important. So say you're, you're a company, and you you've done the hard work of you've got the preventative measure. Is in place. You've got, you know, fraud. Watch, what happens if it still gets stolen? What happens if there's still an issue? Does overhaul play a role in that? And, yeah, and look, obviously, you know, you don't want to see that happen. But of course, it does happen, and that's where, you know, I think that we've excelled, is in response. I think it's a 96% recovery weight when something does get stolen. And we have, you know, extremely detailed, extensive networks globally with law enforcement. I think there was a theft in Poland on a rail shipment, and we had boots on the ground law enforcement there within 20 minutes. I think it was just over 10 minutes. And this was in the middle of nowhere, you know, really out there. And that just speaks to kind of how extensive that network is. And so to answer your question, what we would typically see is an event that occurs in the system. So, you know, maybe the IoT sources come off Route, or it's deviated from the delivery location that it's been moving towards, or perhaps we see a sensor event like that, seal open or door switch, things like that. And so what we would do at that point is, once the event is generated, it goes in front of our security operators team. So we kind of have two stages. We get a lot of raw data into our system. We have over 7 billion data points now of that raw in transit risk monitoring data that gets assessed by the overhaul rules engine once something is triggered there, that gets routed to the appropriate personnel. So if it's something like a seal break that might go direct to the Intelligence Team, they'll kick off their response with law enforcement and say, Hey, we know that something bad happened here. Get law enforcement involved and then respond. They kick off a session where they'll have, you know, the intelligence team member, law enforcement contacts there, and they'll respond and get people on the ground to recover that or track that. And you know, it's, it's really interesting. You see some, you know, high speed chases, and it's pretty intense a lot, you know, really, like I said, going back to Fast and Furious, it's not too far off the what does your when something like that happens? What does like your company look like? Is it like a war room or everybody is, you know, on the phone and checking systems? And, yeah, you know, we've, we've got the process down in procedure, so it's not like something where it's an all hands on deck. We've got the appropriate people who are working, you know, to respond and resolve these events. So it's, it's pretty like clockwork, procedural things happen. It goes through that process of getting the right person in, in touch, monitoring, responding to the the event. So it's, it's really, you know, obviously I'm on the technology side and product side, and I love what we've been able to do, but I'm always in awe of the law enforcement guys and how they've kind of built that network and communicate. It's just super efficient. Yeah, it's just, I think it's absolutely crazy that, you know this not crazy, because I think fraud and just sort of cargo theft has always existed since, you know, the dawn of man, but how it has evolved over even just the last handful of years and how it continues to evolve. And it's just this constant game of, like criminals trying to, you know, one up the tech providers like yourself, and the, you know, the risk providers, or risk protection like overhaul. And so it's an interesting, like cat cat and mouse game that just continues to evolve. Last couple questions here, is there anything important that you think you should mention that we haven't already talked about, you know, I think also you touched on the fundraising there, and you know, that's we're continuing to invest in our AI solutions as well. And, you know, our machine learning and data capabilities. We completed an acquisition a couple of years ago that basically doubled the amount of in transit security events that we had in our system. And it actually was very well timed with Gen AI and the emergence of that as a technology that people wanted to leverage, because it made us centralize our data repository, where, as part of acquiring that company and bringing in that data set, we knew we would need a more refined and robust data infrastructure architecture. And so what that meant is that we have all this data that basically everything that's in the overhaul ecosystem lives there, and then, when GPT came about, it meant that we could easily pass that data back and forth. So, you know, while people are talking about AI and how it can affect business. You know, it really depends on how how good that data set is and how rich it is, and so we were very fortunate that we went through all that effort to centralize it just as GPT emerged, and now we're able to pass that back and forth. So, you know, I just, I do want to call out that today, GPT is the the worst it'll ever be, or Gen AI's worst. So it's important to incorporate that as much as you can into the functionality and products that we're building, because then we'll grow as that continues to develop, and then, just on the, you know, the funding also, you know, continuing to look at m&a, as you know, referring to that previous acquisition that helped us bolster the. Security perspective and the data set we had there, and so we're always looking to expand and grow into adjacent markets and improve our visibility and the data that we have. So that would be something for this year as well as we continue to assess what's out there and how it can bring more value to what we do today, I imagine that data migration project was killers. Absolutely. Yeah, that was, how long did it take? So we actually had a six month timeline on it, so it was very hands on deck, yeah, but you know that on the infrastructure side, that's one of the areas that I'm most proud of. Got a fantastic team there that was able to, you know, get that done, while also competing projects that you go through as an acquisition anyways, so the timeline was aggressive, but yeah, we've got a great team, thankfully. That's awesome six months. That's very admirable, because I'm thinking of, like, all these different data sets that you have in order to rework, I guess, the architecture, and then migrate all of those into that new architecture and have a talk to an LLM like, that is a major undertaking. Yeah, kudos to you. I'm sure it was a nice vacation at the end of that six months, still waiting on it. I guess that's sort of the nature of the the beast when it comes to fraud prevention and risk assessment and things like that. In this industry, it's constantly evolving, Yep, yeah, exactly. And, you know, it's the data, and it's incorporating, you know, in my opinion, humans into that, to enrich and refine and create that loop where the system is assessing the raw data, but then you have that enrichment. When it gets to that law enforcement escalation, you have somebody that's then labeling it, tagging it, and it's going back into the system, and it's continually improving and making our solution more intelligent. That's a hell of a way to end it. Perfect ending. Laura, So Jonathan, where can, where can folks follow you? Follow your work, get maybe get a demo with overhaul, all that good stuff. Yeah, I think over dash hall.com, that's our marketing site. It's the best place to go. And then can also follow us on LinkedIn. Awesome pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of everything is logistics, where we talk all things supply chain for the thinkers in freight, if you like this episode, there's plenty more where that came from. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you never miss a conversation. The show is also available in video format over on YouTube, just by searching everything as logistics. And if you're working in freight logistics or supply chain marketing, check out my company, digital dispatch. We help you build smarter websites and marketing systems that actually drive results, not just vanity metrics. Additionally, if you're trying to find the right freight tech tools are partners without getting buried in buzzwords. Head on over to cargorex.io where we're building the largest database of logistics services and solutions. All the links you need are in the show notes. I'll catch you in the next Episode in go jags. You you