"These are very entrepreneurial people, and very smart. And at this level, it's a business." --Wex Fleet One's William Fitzgerald, speaking in this week's Overdrive Radio episode to the growing level of sophistication among all manner of fraud perpetrators around trucking
William Fitzgerald, head of the Wex company’s anti-crime efforts that regular listeners heard about late in 2025, in the quote above explained just how advanced scams in trucking have gotten.
In this week's podcast, dive back into a small piece of the annual National Association of Small Trucking Companies' conference in October for more perspective on crime in trucking from a panel that aimed to answer the question of just what we mean when we talk about "freight fraud." Too often, leaders around the industry and regulatory bodies lump all manner of schemes in that bucket. We saw it to an extent again with news last week about the Department of Transportation’s intent to utilize AI tools against it.
Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie's report there detailed ways experts believe automated systems can be used for recognition of bad actors, yet specifics in DOT Deputy Secretary Steven Brabury's talk were few and far between. (Keep tuned for follow-ups as Lockie keeps ears to the ground for federal responses to questions.)
[Related: DOT says it will use AI to hunt down fraud, illegal drivers]
For NASTC President David Owen, one woman’s work around an old but ever-evolving issue -- that of "reincarnated" or "chameleon" carriers and/or brokers gaining authority over and over to outrun safety-record and/or insurance/bonding issues -- got him thinking closely about how the association might help small carriers tackle associated problems. Owen brought writer and researcher Danielle Chaffin into NASTC to serve as senior sales engineer following her work mapping out numerous authorized entities she could link to each other in the registration system, as others like freight fraud vigilante Dale Prax have done as well.
She could see clearly patterns of misrepresentation bad actors utilize.
In enforcing the rules against such entities, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is often reactive. A crash happens, FMCSA sees the employing carrier has reincarnated once or multiple times, and shuts them down. That seemed to be the case after the triple-fatal crash of Harjinder Singh. The carrier was unauthorized shortly after that crash came to light.
If enforcement efforts could more readily recognize a chameleon-type operation before such a disaster, though, I imagine it'd come as welcome news to legit trucking companies of all sizes. It's heartening to see DOT leaders at least paying lip service to putting systems in place to help.
With the most high-profile crashes, for all the focus on the status and mistakes of CDL drivers behind the wheel, non-domiciled or not, all are employed somewhere, generally speaking. There's no shortage of analysis concluding many such employers are running around the normal hoops through which good carriers small, large and in between must jump to stay within the bounds of to sustain real, legitimate business.
With real chameleon-type operations, furthermore, panelists note in the podcast, drivers are too often taken advantage of and put in situations they're woefully underprepared for, whether coerced to run over hours or paid pennies on the dollar compared to more typical pro drivers' compensation.
Such operations represent but one of the myriad types of frauds that are perpetrated on legitimate truckers and the American public at large, as excerpts from the NASTC panel discussion here make clear. Panelists also run through a variety of schemes and some ways to tackle them head-on, or prevent them from ever happening in the first place:
Panelists whose voices you'll hear:
- NASTC President David Owen and Senior Sales Engineer/freelance writer Danielle Chaffin
- Kathleen Dasal, formerly of Ansonia Credit Union and Orange Commercial Credit
- Willliam Fitzgerald, Wex
- Stephanie Miller, Travel Centers of America Senior Finance Director
- Tom Robertson, Prepass
Resources:
- Cargo theft prevention
- Recognizing double brokers, managing carrier-vetting systems
- Guarding against identity theft
- Wex's William Fitzgerald's fuel-fraud talk
- "Cyber hygiene" and social-engineering hacks
[Related: Hacked? How to contain the damage, or better avoid the hackers entirely]
