The Mid-America Trucking Show featured no shortage of chicken lights and chrome, as well as an unprecedented show of force from regulators, but overall an unmistakable theme gripped the show: the fight against freight fraud.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration made big news announcing a handful of new fraud and compliance crackdowns around CDL issuance, ELD cheating, and chameleon carriers.
Recent Overdrive polling found just more than half of owner-operators in trucking have been the victim of some form of fraud.
Every day of the show featured multiple panels addressing issues like cargo theft and compliance head-on.
Dale Prax, once self-described as FMCSA's "worst critic," has sounded the alarm on various kinds of non-compliance with federal regs for years, notably breaking the 2023 story of the WTFFMCSA group and some 1,200 brokers and carriers all claiming a single small office building as their Principal Place of Business.
By 2024, the emerging "carrier vetting" industry began flagging carriers with anything suspicious about their PPOB, to the great annoyance of owner-ops everywhere. Yet bad actors never seemed to skip a beat, shifting tactics. Some resorted to buying MC numbers in good standing.
In 2026, rather than the wack-a-mole approach from the tech industry, FMCSA has "ghost offices" in their sights.
FMCSA's investigative teams are looking at "some locations that have 400-500" listed entities at "one PPOB," said agency Administrator Barrs. "How does that happen?"
After all, a PPOB should have inspectable "driver files and vehicle files" ready to go at a moment's notice if FMCSA comes knocking, said Barrs.
Barrs said FMCSA had committed attorneys and special investigators "absolutely trying to address this problem so the cream continues to rise to the top and this industry can continue to thrive," he said. "I'm coming for them."
Prax agreed. "FMCSA has done more in the last five months than in the last five months" to address fraud, he said at a talk on MATS' main stage.
Left: Prax in 2024 gave a speech at MATS thumping a stack of letters he sent out to some 1,100 broker and carrier entities registering with a bad PPOB. At that point, FMCSA was granting about 200 authorities each month to entities that didn't even bother to put a real address. Right: Prax poses with FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs, who pledged to crack down on "ghost offices." Since October 2025, FMCSA has approved just three entities with P.O. Boxes, UPS Stores, or otherwise unconventional PPOBs.
Prax stressed the need for regulators to make the industry come into compliance, and the friction that comes with letting broker-facing vetting platforms fill that void.
A lot of carrier vetting in the past was "overzealous," said Prax, with information asks and barriers to entry that were "intruding on the good guys. ... A lot of vetting platforms have never been in a truck."
[Related: 'Chameleon broker?' AGX Freight goes bust, stiffs carriers, starts new MC]
The result was byzantine rules, red tape that "puts the good guys in a bad place," he added.
Prax's talk, presented by Truckstop and called "Red Flags & Right Questions: How Drivers Stop Fraud," also included lots of practical advice for drivers to stop the bad guys.
First: Ask questions, and the right kind of questions.
Prax said he'd recently worked on a case where a driver hauling a load of 50,000 pounds of beef got a call mid-load to divert it from a warehouse in California to a Kroger store in Phoenix, Arizona.
"I don't know any Kroger stores that take 50,000 pounds of beef," said Prax.
Avoid leading questions, or revealing the answer in your question.
Ask "What's the MC number on the BOL" rather than "Is MC number 123456 on the BOL like it should be?" a fraudster would just say "yes."
Also, while brokers might be terrified of back solicitation, Prax said that often, especially when you get a call to divert the load, the taboo is outdated. Go ahead and call the shipper if you suspect cargo theft.
Otherwise, it's shippers that need an education on the trucking industry, said Prax.
Slowly but surely, trucking is waking up to the menace.
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