Fraud, broker credit checks, bond claims: Weigh in

While an honest broker can be an owner-op's greatest asset, a crooked or simply failing one might be your worst nightmare. 

Managing freight, negotiating rates and ensuring payments due are collected from bona fide brokers ... all make the small business trucker's work hard enough as it is. Add a huge uptick in online scammers to the mix and you've got a brokered-freight world that necessitates front-end due diligence. 

The brokers are certainly verifying your carrier business. (There's a veritable "carrier vetting" cottage industry devoted to it.) How are you verifying theirs? 

Help inform our reporting on fraud, broker credit checks and other vetting via this survey -- it went out to email newsletter subscribers just a little more than a week ago, but we wanted to make sure readers with carrier experience here had ready access. 

Take the survey via this link.  

[Related: 'Chameleon broker?': Big broker AGX Freight goes bust, stiffs carriers, starts new MC]

Developments of recent history reinforce the importance of the issues:

• The landmark broker transparency rulemaking in 2024 at FMCSA, with potential to officially enter the broker-carrier relationship as soon as this year.
• An explosion of cargo theft by fraud ongoing, with no small amount of carrier and broker impersonation by thieves to commandeer loads for themselves.
• Evidence of an increase in broker failures putting carriers’ freight payments at risk.

[Related: Convoy's collapse: Was the tech worth they hype?]

Overdrive wants to hear from owner-operators with motor carrier experience about how you make certain the broker you’re dealing with is who he/she says they are, and how you navigate nonpayment, surety bond claims, credit checks to avoid potential “chameleon brokers,” and middlemen’s increasing reliance on those “carrier vetting” systems’ sometimes unreasonable demands.

Business

Overdrive's Load Profit Analyzer

Know your costs, owner-operators? Compute the potential profit in any truckload, access per-day and per-mile breakouts, and compare brokers' offers on multiple loads. Enter your trucking business's fixed and variable costs, and load information, to get started. Need help? Access this video to walk through examples with Overdrive’s own Gary Buchs, whose work assessing numbers in his own business for decades inspired the Analyzer to begin with.

Try it out!

Bolster reporting through the remainder of the year, too, with opinion on the transparency rulemaking, surety bond amounts, and more. Simply follow the link above or below to begin the brief questionnaire if you haven't run through it yet. 

It won't take much of your time. And here's huge thanks for your views and intel.