Forza Intelligence · Carrier verification
Ninety-four percent of U.S. motor carriers have no FMCSA safety data on file. Almost every conversation about carrier vetting skips past that number, and it is the number that explains everything else.
What the number actually means
It does not mean 94 percent of carriers are dangerous. Most of them are small, new, or simply have not accumulated enough roadside inspections or reportable events to generate a score. The federal record is thin for the same reason a new driver has no claims history.
What it means is that for the overwhelming majority of carriers, the authoritative public safety record is silent. If your broker’s process is to check the FMCSA record and move on, then on most loads that process returns nothing, and nothing gets read as fine.
Why fraud lives in that gap
Freight fraud is not usually a break-in. It is a company that looks correct on paper using a real carrier’s authority, an email domain one character off the real one, and a phone number it controls. When the federal record is silent, the forged paperwork has nothing to contradict it.
Digital fraud now accounts for close to a third of all cargo theft events. Cargo theft rose 18 percent year over year in 2025, with $128 million in reported losses in the second quarter alone, and food and beverage theft up 68 percent. Refrigerated freight is disproportionately targeted because it is resaleable, perishable enough that the loss compounds, and often moving on tight windows where nobody wants to slow down to ask questions.
What closes the gap
The only workable answer is independent sources that do not depend on the carrier telling the truth. Not one lookup, several, run against each other:
- Identity, not just authority. The company on the rate confirmation has to be the company at the dock. That means verifying the dispatcher and the contact channels they actually control, not the ones printed on the paperwork.
- Physical observation. A sensor network that has seen the tractor and trailer in motion answers a question no document can.
- Insurance validated at the source. Certificates arrive by email and email is the attack surface. Validation means going to the insurer’s record.
- Monitoring after booking. Authority lapses and insurance cancels. A carrier that cleared on Monday is not necessarily clear on Thursday.
- Fraud signals specifically. Double brokering, domain spoofing, synthetic identities and chameleon carriers are their own detection problem, separate from safety scoring.
The question worth asking your broker
Not “do you vet carriers.” Everyone says yes. Ask instead: on a load where FMCSA returns no safety data, what specifically happens next? The answer tells you whether there is a protocol or a habit.
